In my mind, OpenAI is different from the other labs you mention because their goal is to harness the power of their own god. Bell Labs, for most of its history, was tasked with improving the Bell System, so anything that was remotely related to the system was fair game. Maybe these things seem "not much different" to you, but they seem dramatically different to me.

I'm not really that convinced anyone is substantially closer to artificial general intelligence that anyone was in the 50s or 60s, and I think it's fun to imagine what Bell Labs might have achieved if they decided to focus all of their efforts on creating artificial general intelligence. Not much, I would think.

> a bet in the future being better than today

No, it's a bet that openai will create general intelligence and make a profit off of it in some timeframe such that it doesn't make more sense to get your 100x returns through ordinary means. OpenAI can achieve this without the "future being better than today," and conversely the future can be better than today without OpenAI achieving this.