Plugins were a failure. GPTs are a little better, but I still don't see the product market fit. GPT-4 is still king, but not by that much any more. It's not even clear that they're doing great research, because they don't publish.
GPT-5 has to be incredibly good at this point, and I'm not sure that it will be.
As the popularity has exploded, and ethical questions have become increasingly relevant, it is probably worth taking some time to nail certain aspects down before releasing everything to the public for the sake of being first.
Altman saga, allowing military use and other small things step by step tarnish your reputation and pushes you to the mediocrity or worse.
Microsoft has many great development stories (read Raymond Chen's blog to be awed), but what they did at the end to other competitors and how they behave removed their luster, permanently for some people.
Unfortunately, no deep piles of gold without deep piles of corpses. It is inevitable, though. Prompted by the US military, other countries have also always pioneered or acquired advance tech, and I don't see why AI would be any different: Never send a human to do a machine's job is as ominous now as it is dystopian as machines increasingly become more human-like.