> Why do you? I'm asking seriously
Serious answer then.
The reality is that the higher the pay, the less it stings when people screw you over. If OpenAI was a low pay startup, Ilya would probably feel a lot more bitter about what happened. People care for various reasons. You don't need to care, because you actually already have what I described above, because of three reasons:
1. the work that you did and the country in which you did it
2. the people you were surrounded with while you were doing it
3. the culture around it, especially the US is very vocal about what they achieve, which automatically became a huge (possibly) unintentional mutual marketing platform for you and your friends.
There are plenty of security people that have contributed to the security community just as much as you, but make a fraction of the money. Good for you, honestly, but not everyone has had those opportunities. For many of us(I for example grew up in Germany as an immigrant), the predominant culture is to not invest in people like us(very different from the valley), and to make sure to constantly tell them that they can only be successful if they are good worker bees. It took someone convincing me to leave to the UK to realize that.
I want to know and improve, because I have made several people and institutions rich or contributed to their fame, because of whatever work I did or whatever thing I reverse engineered, and got ultimately burned with zero credit.
LLM's would exist with or without OpenAI, but it's absolutely fascinating that Sam how somehow managed to convince the world(outside of a big scientific and engineering niche) that ChatGPT would not have happened without him, but that conversely everyone at ChatGPT is disposable. Even if you don't care about Sam in general it may be worth caring about it in some fashion, when he's lobbying on Capitol Hill to limit access to non regulated AI.
It's only natural for me to want to learn some of it, to at least protect myself in the future.