alt Hacker NewsHanlon's Razor does not apply. When you can reasonably forsee existential risk, and then don't do anything to mitigate it, or selectively filter for the people most risk blind to it such that you can keep on trucking til someone else is forced to stop you, that isn't stupidity. That is premeditated malice.
If you deliberately refuse to even entertain the reasonably foreseeable, it can be forgiven on the scale of a toy project, but when it gets to the point of trillion dollar resource sinks, it is long past time to have sat down and had a long think. It is harder to maintain a mind state in which not doing the right thing is the way ahead, and the real right thing to do is to do it wrong!
Finally, even if Hanlon's Razor is applicable, why in the name of all that is holy are you leaving the issue in question in the hands of people proven incompetent to handle it unsupervised?
Easier to file it under malice and handle the party in question as appropriately malicious until they establish a record of trustworthiness, transparency, and care.
At the level of CEO (Sam Altman), I agree there is malice there. He is possibly the worst kind of person to be in that position. But I don't agree at the level of the researchers.
Most researchers at Anthropic see existential risk and it frightens them (this isn't debatable and it isn't a con, I know this firsthand). Many of the researchers at OpenAI seem to see that risk in the same way that teenagers view the risk of driving a car really fast. They are so enamored with the potential danger and lack the maturity to understand their responsibilities that they just power full steam ahead without thinking through safety properly. Just listen to how they talk about it. They think the incidents are fascinating, but they do treat everything as a genuine "oops". I don't know about you, but I usually treat teenage daredevil behavior as stupidity rather than malice. Doesn't mean they're not responsible for their actions though.
I agree that the party involved should be treated as malicious. I believe the executive at OpenAI is malicious. But I think the world model that makes this all make a lot more sense is that the researchers at OpenAI are vastly less mature than they should be, especially given the responsibility that they have.