I disagree. Appearing incompetent is much worse for OpenAI than appearing greedy. Their primary business is selling AGI hype to investors, not selling the current product to consumers.
I think the idea is more or less that this has changed. Like how much more hype can you sell when you are approaching 500B valuation, 1 billion users and a huge burn rate. Uber is the classic example of the startup with huge burn and high valuation and it's peanuts compared to the AI arena. But uBer disrupted a huge market with a very clear value proposition and monetization strategy.
Then ‘roll back’ to the real version - but only for paid users.
Imagine how much worse it’d have gone if they called it GPT-4o lite and gave that to free users only and kept 4o for paid only.
Maybe it will make more people subscribe?
But it will make people cancel their subs too - I miss o3