1. No social interaction or learning. Octopuses[1] live alone.
2. Short life span. Most of them live only few years in the wild.
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[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-many-plura...
3. Living underwater. Fire is the easiest way to extract energy from raw materials, and there's no real substitute. On land, there's a lot of local, controllable dynamism, but when you put things down they tend to stay where you put them, at least on short timescales. Water is exactly the opposite: lots of changes you can't control, but no way to get a lot of energy all in one place. Dolphins would have a hard time developing technology for the same reason, even if they had the dexterity.
4. Not being apex predators. This is part of the short lifespan problem, but I think it goes beyond that. Not many animals are going to mess with a human if they can help it, which means that it didn't take much for us to get to the point of having some free brain cycles to spend on improving things. An octopus is comparatively small and squishy, and shares an environment with comparatively more large and toothy carnivores, which means that even when they do manage to survive for more than a couple years they're doing it by spending most of their time eating and hiding.
The point of fire is rapid oxidation that provides enough heat to melt metals.
Set aside what we know about human technological progress. You need some energy source to be the base of your technology pyramid, and it needs a few properties: it needs to be naturally occurring so that you can discover it by accident; it needs to be controllable or predictable enough that you can use it selectively; and it needs to be fast/intense enough that you can transform materials without massive time investment. What do you pick? On land, you have fire, flowing water, and, at a stretch, the muscles of large herbivores. Underwater, you have... ???
Also, that's not what "anthropic principle" means.
Modern humans for instance spend more time learning than the lifespan of most animals. If we were limited to a lifespan of 20 years, which is typical for a mammal of our weight class, human society would have been very different. Make it 5 years and there probably wouldn't have been any society at all.
This, I believe, makes them even weirder. With so much intelligence, why didn't they evolve longevity as a way to capitalize on their experience? Why didn't they develop collective strategies that are so effective in other animal species?
They didn't develop longevity because intelligence + longlivety does not provide immediate advantage.
They didn't develop collective strategies because they the path path to collective strategies providing gains is too long or too unlikely to happen.
Even in human brain huge area of brain dedicated into hands. Human fine motor skill (or dexterity) is superior compared to other apes. We can do small detailed moves. Other apes and monkeys are clumsy.
After the complexity of brain developed to control their dexterity, octopus gets benefit from spatiotemporal intelligence to exploit tentacles in hunting and moving. It's not surprising that intelligence plan and solve problems as well.
However, they seem to die very soon after mating for some reason related to their evolutionary history. There's no way for a marginally longer-lived octopus to be more successful at reproduction, because reproduction is a one-shot event for them. If anything there's pressure to reproduce (and die) at a younger age, since these octopi would be more successful.
Such are the tragedies of evolution, the blind idiot god.
https://www.nature.com/news/octopus-genome-holds-clues-to-un...
Trade-off between Transcriptome Plasticity and Genome Evolution in Cephalopods https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30344-6
• Unlike other taxa, cephalopods diversify their proteomes extensively by RNA editing
• Extensive recoding is specific to the behaviorally complex coleiods
• Unlike mammals, cephalopod recoding is evolutionarily conserved and often adaptive
•Transcriptome diversification comes at the expense of slowed-down genome evolution
You gotta wonder what sort of environmental pressures make intelligent animals less fit for survival by creating communities. Few predators? Very simple environments that don't require passing on information to future generations? High competition for resources?