There seems to be soooo much background feeling that the official large companies of AI are in control of things. Or should be. Or can be.

Can they? When plenty of groups are more interesting in exploiting the advances? When plenty of hackers will first try to work around the constraints - before even using the system as-is? When it's difficult even to define what AGI might test like or look like? When it might depend on a small detail or helper?

Several years is a quite small position. Decades is still extremely concerning.