I don't know much about AI development but does OpenAI really have some secret sauce? Aren't the algorithms mostly public and OpenAI's main advantage was to have enough money to build something? Won't other companies do the same too, just a little later? I feel people like Altman will lose interest once they have sold OpenAI for big money.
This is mostly true, yeah. Although in certain cases OpenAI is indeed pushing research forward themselves (not only using existing algorithms/architectures just at scale) and therefore has first mover's advantage, e.g. with reinforcement-learning-based fine-tuning based on human preferences (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, RLHF), which is basically the secret sauce which turned the original relatively-dumb GPT-3 (pure language model, "document autocomplete", what is the next most likely token based on my training data) into ChatGPT (what token would a human prefer to come next).