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No, my past recommendations have been "plant a nuke under the datacenter." More seriously, it probably would have depended on the characteristics of the models behavior in the past, and the characteristics of their setup, which I am not privy to. It sounds like OpenAI had good reason to believe that their setup was not vulnerable.
Well, I could recommend it now and then trivially answer "yes." And the actual answer to that question is more "well can the model write malware without you people who wrote the model and have access to the software and hardware on the machine noticing?" But apparently they don't monitor their models during testing well enough to notice an involved hack-a-thon (understandably, watching a model grind inference is boring) so the answer to that might be "no, even if it is physically possible we're not necessarily going to take those steps."
Let's say that based on what I do know, I think it would probably be a good idea, and if they don't take this step they should take others. Even if you aren't worried about existential risk, good old reputational risk and legal exposure I think is a good enough reason to do this.
You're right that I probably should have taken the storage-for-weights-and-cooling problem a bit more seriously (although I guess if this model is actually very optimized then it might be able to run on a local machine, which would make it pretty easy). So I concede that setting it up properly would be a PITA. But once you set it up, I don't think actually running it would be hard ("remove the Wi-fi antenna"). They definitely have enough money to build that, or buy a welding workshop somewhere with the electrical infrastructure, server space, and possibly cooling requirements already in place and air-gap it. So it's hardly a PITA for a company that is already working to build dedicated datacenters, in the big scheme of things.
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