Its really impressive that they stuck to their vision over the long term. This is difficult and more challenging than it sounds.
To me it's more about the funders staying engaged. For the people working in the startup as long as it's exciting and you're getting paid enough it seems really fun to get that much runway - why would you leave unless there are personality/direction conflicts??
Not sure what happened on this page, but I saw so much AI tells on this particular page that I had to check archive.org and apparently the page has only been around for two years.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://openai.c...
Although they did loosely stick to their vision they also didn't right? I mean this as a company not the extremely subsidized research. They aren't open sourcing anything, they are now for profit, they are advertising, etc.
I wouldn't view them as consistent at anything other then myopicly following the more or less obvious trends required to sustain LLM architectures over the years