I don't think they have any desire to use this knowledge for their own gain, since they explicitly say that your data will not be used to train their future models - both OpenAI is saying that about their trainable ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo model, and Azure OpenAI Service was clear on that as well.
I think the future is extremely well-trained base models that are then fine-tuned on specific domain knowledge. I'm already seeing that with Meta's Llama 2 personally at home. My company has access to Azure OpenAI Service's GPT-4 trainable model that we've been working with on all our documentation, and the results look very promising so far.
But, this idea of the All-Knowing Oracle that can answer any question you have is all well and good, but it's so far beyond our current processing power as to be a pointless endeavor at the moment. Will we get there eventually? Yeah, sure. According to Jim Keller as of around 2019/2020 when he was speaking on Lex Fridman's podcast, he said we still have room to go 1,000,000 times smaller - meaning chips. I think we probably need two more orders of magnitude in processing power of the strongest high-end GPUs before we're there. NVIDIA's H100 is a great achievement, but we need something about 100x as fast, and I think we'll still need dozens of them working in parallel to train the model that can answer all these questions.
All of this though is a moot point, because it's the lawyers that have already slowed down progress. OpenAI is terrified of being sued. Altman couches it behind terms like, "AI Safety", "AI Alignment", etc., but it's fear. It's all stemming from fear. And it's all stemming from people just not "getting it".
We're entering a new age of upheaval, and there's going to be rogue AIs that tell people to go kill themselves to reduce climate change. You know why? Because there are humans that tell people to go kill themselves to reduce climate change. These models are language models. We taught them how to think, and we taught them how to think like us, so it's no surprise to me whatsoever that they behave like us - meaning they occasionally lie and they occasionally go off the rails and go a little crazy.
We have become gods and we have made a creation in our own image. Most of the time it's awesome, sometimes it's a little wild and wacky.