IMO the proportion of effort into AI alignment research scales with total AI investment. Lots of AI labs themselves do alignment research and open source/release research on the matter.
OpenAI at least ostensibly has a mission. If OpenAI didn’t make the moves they did, Google would have their spot, and Google is closer to the “evil self-serving corporation” archetype than OpenAI
I agree. OpenAI claimed in the gpt-4o blog post that it is an entirely new model trained from the ground up. GPT-N refers to capabilities, not a specific architecture or set of weights. I imagine GPT-5 will likely be an upscaled version of 4o, as the success of 4o has revealed that multi-modal training can reach similar capabilities at what is likely a smaller number of weights (judging by the fact that gpt-4o is cheaper and faster than 4 and 4T)