Recently, OpenAI has been releasing products that don't seem to advance the goal of creating AGI or Superintelligent AI. The social video product Sora is one such product. Though at least it involves a new AI model that might teach them lessons about developing capabilities. Another is the AI-enabled browser Atlas.

Why is OpenAI spending the manpower, compute, and management focus to create and support these products instead of using those resources to race toward more powerful AI?

I am most interested in public sources from OpenAI or answers from those who have direct knowledge. If you have a different speculation from mine, share that too.

Speculation on possible reasons:

• Investors want OpenAI to have more revenue or more products. I could imagine that not all investors fully believe the vision of reaching AGI, or suspect that reaching superintelligence will destroy their investment, as capitalism is fully disrupted.
• These products enable collecting data that they can use to train AIs. (I'm not clear how that would be the case.)
• They are "dogfooding" their coding assistant AI and need projects to use it on, so they have made these products. (But even if you've developed it, that doesn't mean it is worth the costs of releasing and supporting it.)
• Their employees want to develop cool products and see the fruits of their work. Creating and releasing these products keeps the employees happy, so they will continue to be maximally productive in advancing AI.
• OpenAI is bottlenecked on AI researchers. They cannot develop more powerful AI any faster than they are, so they can afford to hire developers and others to create products. Those products encourage the buildout of computing capabilities that will be available when the AI researchers need them.
• AI development is slowing or hitting bottlenecks, so they want to capture the market share of products that can be developed with current levels of AI.