This is the money grab part of the show.

As LLM capabilities start to plateau, everyone with any sort of name recognition is scrambling to ride the hype to a big pay day before reality catches up with marketing.

It's probably neither of those things. People can only be pissed off + burnt out for so long before they throw up their hands and walk out. Even if AGI is a random number of months away... or isn't.

Seems obvious to me that the quality of the models is not improving since GPT-4. The departures I’m guessing are a problem talent has with ‘founder mode’, Altman’s choice of fast pace, this absence of model improvement with these new releases, and the relative temptation of personal profit outside of OpenAI’s not-for-profit business model. People think they can do better in control themselves. I suspect they are all under siege with juicy offers of funding and opportunities. Whether or not they will do better is another story. My money is on Altman, I think he is right on the dumpster rocket idea, but it’s very difficult to see that when you’re a rocket scientist.

No it's more like, with the direction of company there are lots of unhappy people - but this gave them the right opportunity (and optics) to leave (now they don't need to justify leaving this corp to their friend)

Looks like far away is more reasonable.

Why would they leave if AGI was near?

If they had any equity they might've vested and decided there is more to life than working there. It's hard to be very motivated to work at high pace when you can retire any moment without losing your lifestyle.