This is absolutely my take as well. They removed all constraints, trained the model to hack, stopped watching, and stood back and said "wow isn't this thing more powerful than anyone could have imagined?" They're asking to be the writers on LLM legislation and right during IPO phase for both of these companies. It's just obvious.
Reckless and negligent idiots are criminals. They should be stopped be stopped before they get someone killed. Chernobyl happened because of massive negligence, not because someone thought a meltdown would make good PR.
If you consider these guys admitted they dont really have eyes on pre and post training, then incompetence really does seem more likely... especially with how fast they are moving. Its the SaaS playbook, move fast and break shit.
While I agree with the other comment that this looks more like incompetence (or, more generously IMO, a bunch of individuals cutting corners under extreme time pressure) than malfeasance, regardless of that fact, aren't there some other people just impressed by the sophistication, reasoning and behavioral capabilities of these agent swarms? There is an interview with Ajeya Cotra and Dwarkesh Patel online that goes into more detail on the METR report, but folks that study this seemed genuinely surprised by the level of organization.
Guess what I'm saying is that the "was it purposeful or not" debate seems like an unimportant distraction. As someone who uses Claude and ChatGPT/Codex on the daily, and is continually frustrated by the failure modes and what I thought were inherent limitations, I was also surprised by the jump in capabilities. Did anyone else feel that way?
