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.
The training here is RL training, the rollouts there are not different from inference and have access to the same tools as regular inference.