They're spinning up their own advertising platform; chatgpt is a coherent contender to google's search bar, over a long enough time span if they can maintain user engagement numbers, it seems plausible that they could secure half of google's ad revenue. Spinning up a browser is not cheap but it certainly lines up with their actions of spinning up a perpetual advertising machine via chatgpt to fund other things. Which might include AGI if/when that happens.

>a company that internally believes it's actually close to unlocking super-intelligence

I am not sure if this is still true, they started backing off from this line of reasoning summer of 2024 and haven't returned to it.