You are assuming sama is not bullshitting you about the whole “own AGI” and “capture all the value in the lightcone” gobbledygook. It sounds like a high-stakes game? Of course it does! Sama isn’t some technical wizard, but an entrepreneur. He’s marketing his (completely ordinary) company.
There’s a world where ChatGPT and other GenAI tools are a multi-trillion dollar market, but where they also don’t get anywhere close to AGI, let alone some hyperintelligent machine god. Occam’s razor suggests that’s indeed the world we’re in.