[pseudohadamard]

  Something missing in this discussion is people asking _why_ it is that they're doing this. The people who work there aren't stupid!

They have infinite amounts of investor money to burn and no obvious way forward. TFA's line about "spaghetti at the wall" pretty much summed up what happens in that situation.

And in terms of "the people who work there aren't stupid", you can have technically talented people who are very good at their specific thing and hopeless at anything else, a friend of mine once summed it up as "the dumbest smart people I ever met". This is why you need skilled management to let them do their thing but also steer them in the right direction as they're doing it. From the descriptions of OpenAI it's kinda rudderless apart from the one-man hype machine at the top.