It's pretty easy to imagine them creating a new AI that is an order of magnitude better than the current models with no one else having access to that technology.
That doesn't mean there's any actual mechanism for me to do so.
What you're talking about requires a genuine breakthrough in AI research, not just iterative improvements on what we've already got. By their very nature, those are not something that can be predicted or relied upon; you cannot even be guaranteed that a given type of breakthrough will ever happen.