1/ The internal users at labs and external users are completely different.
2/ The lab people use the models to create recursive systems, systems to create prompts or synthetic data sets etc etc etc. Way different mentality than "fix the bug, make no mistakes"
Is it really so farfetched to think they've been having models fuck with the weights of models? I think it's entirely possible, probably even likely as a way of generating permutations of synthetic datasets that will then be included or excluded
If you subscribe to this, then it would be entirely possible for this to have become a major part of post-training and be practically impossible to exclude from public facing models, which are famously hard to govern. The models barely know their own version numbers.