I think your last point is the main point. They're going hard at reenforcement learning to improve how good the models are at coding and such, but RL will make

I think your last point is the main point. They're going hard at reenforcement learning to improve how good the models are at coding and such, but RL will make models cheat unless you're super careful. But being careful slows things down. It feels to me like the focus has been so much on getting results that they started to get really sloppy with everything else and maybe even didn't want to know about problems that might slow things down. Exactly what you don't want for the people developing powerful AI systems.