These are all people running AI labs! They want investment, and what better way to get investment than to tell people you're going to create Terminator? The people leaving OpenAI are joining other labs – their livelihoods depend on AI companies receiving investment: "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it".

> The models keep getting better at an exponential [sic].

We don't know if this is true. A lot of growth that appears exponential is often quadratic (https://longform.asmartbear.com/exponential-growth/) or follows a logistic function (e.g. Moore's law).

Additionally there's a LOT of benchmark gaming going on, and a lot of the benchmark solving is not down to having a process that actually solves the problems; it just turns out that the problems already kind of lie in the span of text on the internet.