I don't think these comments are driven from financial incentives. It's a distraction and only a fool would believe Altman here. What this likely means is they are prioritizing adding more features to their current models while they train the next version. Their competitors scramble to build an LLM with some sort of intelligence parity, when that happens no one will care because ChatGPT has the ecosystem and plugins and all the advanced features....and by the time their competitors reach feature parity in that area, OpenAI pulls its Ace card and drops GPT5. Rinse and repeat.
That's my theory and if I was a tech CEO in any of the companies competing in this space, that is what I would plan for.
Training an LLM will be the easy part going forward. It's building an ecosystem around it and hooking it up to everything that will matter. OpenAI will focus on this, while not-so-secretly training their next iterations.
text-davinci-003 but cheaper and runs on your own hardware is already a massive selling point. If you you release a foundational model at parity with GPT4 you'll win overnight because OpenAI's chat completions are awful even with the super advanced model.
That's my theory and if I was a tech CEO in any of the companies competing in this space, that is what I would plan for.
Training an LLM will be the easy part going forward. It's building an ecosystem around it and hooking it up to everything that will matter. OpenAI will focus on this, while not-so-secretly training their next iterations.