Just to add some slight nuance but is an important distinction,

They aren't all necessarily racing to be "god", some are racing to make sure someone else is not "god".

If it weren't for Altman releasing ChatGPT, it's very likely that we would have markedly less powerful LLMs at our disposal right now. Deepmind and Anthropic were taking incredibly safe and conservative approaches towards transformers, but OAI broke the silent truce and forced a race.