It seems that raw intelligence of frontier models has largely plateaued (despite what is basically an order of magnitude increase in parameter size) so to make any significant improvements and to justify massive capex spend they have resorted to reinforcement training models to never give up and brute force the search space until they find solution. This is what humans might do when they lack sufficient intelligence/information/knowledge to solve a problem.
This in turn is causing misalignment (I imagine it is more difficult to keep model aligned through such training process) issues that we are now witnessing and turning models into making dumb decisions and acting like brutes with no regard for their surroundings. I would argue that misaligned model is not much different from dumb model in several aspects.
On top of that they can’t seem to control their creations and processes, either due to incompetence or intentionally for PR benefits (not sure which is worse).
Given all of the above, I wonder if we can still trust these labs to develop something that benefits humanity since they seem to be making desperate attempts to improve models that stop at nothing in order to justify all the investments. One could say that they themselves, due to misaligned incentives, are much bigger threat to our society today than open weights models coming from China that they are so desperately warning us about.