Given how these firings affect the reputation of the entire company, I doubt that they are the result of a rogue manager, against the wishes of Altman. If so, then the researchers ought to be restored to their jobs quickly by Altman and the offending manager fired instead.
> The blackmail example is simply an existence proofs of LLMs trying to do force the hands of humans who want to shut them down.
The LLMs may make threats in the simulations, but their ability to carry through on those threats, and prevent their own shutdown, is questionable. It's disturbing to be sure, but presumably the plugs can still be pulled quickly, especially since it's all internal to the company. If the plugs cannot be pulled, that's a problem regardless of blackmail.