[advael]

I won't comment on whether I believe those researchers hold those views as you describe them, but as you describe them, I think both those descriptions of the state of AI research are untrue. The capabilities demonstrated by transformer models seem necessary but not sufficient to understand and reason, meaning that while they're not necessarily a "dead end", it is far from guaranteed that adding more compute will get them there

Of course if we allow for any arbitrary "research breakthrough" to happen then any outcome that's physically possible could happen, and I agree with you that superhuman artificial intelligence is possible. Nonetheless it remains unclear what research breakthroughs need to happen, how difficult they will be, and whether handing a company like OpenAI lots of money and chips will get that done, and it remains even more unclear whether that is a desirable outcome, given that the priorities of that company seem to shift considerably each time their budget is increased (As is the norm in this economic environment, to be clear, that is not a unique problem of OpenAI)

Obviously OpenAI has every reason to claim that it can do this and to claim that it will use the results in a way designed to benefit humanity as a whole. The people writing this promotional copy and the people working there may even believe both of these things. However, based on the information available, I don't think the first claim is credible. The second claim becomes less credible the more of the company's original mission gets jettisoned as its priorities align more to its benefactors, which we have seen happen rather rapidly