Here’s a talk where Open AI co-founder Ilya Sutskever talks about the issue of AI progress and AGI. (Before the timestamp he was talking about Open AI’s specific projects such as Dota 2 and their hand robot).
tl;dw: (italics indicate my interpolations):
AGI in the near-medium term can’t be ruled out based on current rates of progress.
AI progress is more constrained by hardware than by conceptual advances (partly because it’s hard to make conceptual advances if you don’t have the hardware to test them with).
Companies and researchers are willing to make increasingly large investments into compute hardware (at rate greater than Moore’s Law).
Open AI is also working on what we would consider Friendliness (but seemingly not at the same level of rigour as MIRI).
I would agree, with a qualification. Due to OAI co-founders personal risk attitude I would say as an organization they care less about it. As far as the actual quality of research they have some pretty respectable people like Paul Christiano Dario Amodei (respectable here is a second-hand judgement, do not consider myself qualified for 1st hand)