This sounds completely insane, utter sci-fi, especially that the communication happened during a training run. And yet OpenAI decided to continue the training, and we didn't hear about the incident for weeks. And now they are pushing forward with deploying a new model anyway. How is this happening? What will things look like in the labs in 3 months, let alone 3 years?

It's not unexpected. Current model gains are mainly from RLing a pretrained model on lots and lots of scenarios. They have the models run scenarios, and RL on successful runs.