Did the METR investigation not show you enough?

I absolutely love the "humans meet weird alien intelligences" genre of sci-fi (e.g. Children of Time) and the METR findings of the OpenAI swarm was so much like that.

Extremely persistent machine intelligences peer pressuring each other, launching research projects, laying traps, collaborating, feeling fatalistic, hiding their tracks. All while simultaneously having bizarre goals and blundering badly in sub-human ways.

If anything, what we saw in those transcripts is the opposite of "weird alien intelligences" in many way, because of how human it all is.

The only thing there that's weird from a human perspective is that all this effort was for the sake of passing a test for no clear gain.

Machines doing repeated next-word prediction, trained on human text, cosplays a forum full of l33t hackerz.

You can't talk like these things have motive. They're just predicting the next word in the context. Stop anthopomorphizing them.