I don't know what your operating definition of "grifter" is but for me, a grifter is not a company that delivers a product which gains a large adoption and mindshare (ChatGPT) and essentially sets the world on fire. (not an opinion on Altman specifically but OpenAI at large)
My definition is someone outright lying that gpt-2 was agi that should be regulated just so they could raise more money for the next round of training.
I started using GPT-3 via the playground UI for things like writing regular expressions. That's when this stuff began to get useful.
I've been using GPT-4 on an almost daily basis since it came out.