>>seydor+(OP)
Perhaps, but who knew? Nobody at that time knew how to build AGI, and what it therefore might look like. I'm sure people would have laughed at you if you said "predict next word" was the path to AGI. The transformer paper that kicked off the LLM revolution would not be written for another couple of years. DeepMind was still focusing on games, with AlphaGo also still a couple of years away.
OpenAI's founding charter was basically we'll protect you from an all-powerful Google, and give you the world's most valuable technology for free.