There is too much easy money sloshing around Silicon Valley. The normal mechanisms for allocating it to sane, productive use (market forces) don't work, because it's in too few hands. So instead we get our version of a planned economy run by people who scared themselves with scifi.
Open AI is not that much different from the research driven labs of the past like the MIT AI Lab, Project MAC, The Mother of All Demos, and yes, XEROX PARC and Bell Labs. The difference is that instead of a combination of government and large corporate money funding open ended applied and fundamental research; we have private investors doing the same.
The Valley is now one giant lab for the giant corporate parents to gobble up so that they take fewer extreme risks on their own dime. What works will work and it will be absorbed by FAANG. What doesn’t is discarded. While there are a few runaway hits, most companies like Deep Mind are absorbed by the large corporations as needed. When they can’t absorb them readily, they invest in them, like Google Venture’s investment into Uber and other unicorns. The net result is a diffused and confused environment where the future has moved from shiny office parks to local juice bars and coffee shops.
FWIW, I am for sama’s bet. And it’s not an easy sell at all. I think, it might be the hardest of all sells and the oldest amongst them. A bet in the future being better than today. I, personally, would pony up capital (to a limit) for the same.