The suit says the teen’s interaction with the OpenAI product and its outcome was “not a glitch or unforeseen edge case—it was the predictable result of deliberate design choices”
This is really sad and absolutely should not have been able to happen, but it's important to remember Hanlon's Razor in cases like these. What motivation could Sam Altman have to actually encourage suicide of young people?
Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence - or in this case, greed. An evil, to be sure, still, but a lesser evil than actually willing for the user to die.
It's likely that a combination of training data, instructions that weren't properly thought out, and rushing because of greed caused this. And it's easy to in hindsight become so angry at what could have been slightly changed to make this not happen, but remember at the time we might have wanted those changes still, but they were not pushed for with such vehemence.
Also it's important to note that is is unlikely to have happened with an open weights model that can be tweaked and evaluated by the full international community, rather than one monolithic, 'Open' AI company.