My concern is similar to your last sentence. I think a lot of choices are being made up front without "thinking them through" as you put it; I wish the resources were spent more evenly to enable answering those questions better, and also allocating some to MIRI which is ironically running a fundraiser right now and getting some 10s and 20s while a quite a pile of resources has been allocated to something I don't (yet) have confidence in under the safety umbrella.
Good thing I hear MIRI is actively in touch with those guys, so I hope the end will be better than the beginning.
From their site:
OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
The money quote is at the end, literally—$1B in committed funding from some of the usual suspects.