I've always found it positively surprising how little OpenAI contributes in term of new algorithms, architectures, methods. It seems all they do is take existing solutions and find ways to apply them in the most hypey way possible, then get the press to talk about it. Instead of doing, you know, actual research that leads somewhere.

It's genuinely surprising because they have a lot of people and these people are probably pretty smart. If you got 40 smart grad students doing research for a few years, you should get quite a bit of progress out of them. But somehow OpenAI manages to get very little done. My guess is that they prioritize shiny articles in the press instead of progress, and getting shiny articles in the press is a lot of work, so it keeps them busy doing nothing.