If they think AGI is imminent the value of that payday is very limited. I think the grandparent is more correct: OpenAI is admitting that near term AGI - which, being that the only one anyone really cares about is the case with exponential self improvement - isn't happening any time soon. But that much is obvious anyway despite the hyperbolic nonsense now common around AI discussions.

Define "imminent".

If I were a person like several of the people working on AI right now (or really, just heading up tech companies), I could be the kind to look at a possible world-ending event happening in the next - eh, year, let's say - and just want to have a party at the end of the world.

Five years to ten years? Harder to predict.

Imminent means "in a timeframe meaningful to the individual equity holders this change is about."

The window there would at _least_ include the next 5 years, though obviously not ten.