I am still not convinced there isn’t some secret basement in which each frontier lab is just orchestrating all of these agents to make their products appear much more intelligent than they are with all guard rails turned of and continuous human input.

Even the Chinese ones, which have no IPO gymnastics?

My hypothesis on people quitting in protest is they're being offered very generous severance packages to do it.

Well let’s look at facts - provided enough compute and a goal, these system will be in a sort of loop trying out every single thing that’s in their system - they have encyclopedic knowledge and so it’s not unbelievable that a prompt which usually has a lot of implicit human rules in it can be misunderstood by AI and it just tries everything in its arsenal and we hear about the things which actually resulted in damage. I bet most of the time, they just spin in loops without achieving much if my experience with these LLMs is anything to go by. They have an important advantage in one area though, they know a lot and they can spin forget trying all sorts of combinations of things. The danger right now is probably cybersecurity, which is most likely because most orgs have historically underinvested in that area