What AI is going after, that is, the size of the pie, is the $50 trillion per year portion of global GDP that makes up wages. Putting aside the risks (which are enormous) when you see it that way you begin to understand OpenAI's valuation late last year, and that that's just the tip of the iceberg of what's coming.

The risk of disrupting a sizable chunk of the world's wages is fuel for a separate post and conversation. IMHO it's the real risk of AI, and the Skynet scenario around ASI/AGI that has been popularized is a distraction.

There is no end goal. It's just a bunch of independent actors who are all trying to get ahead of their competitors a step at a time. Two steps if they're lucky. The collective system steers into whichever direction was determined by the previous set of steps, with very little potential for any individual actor to turn it around.