While I'm as cynical as anyone, for what it's worth, it seems to me that such deceleration is broadly in line with their founding charter, where they wrote:

> We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be “a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years.”

https://openai.com/charter/

> “We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels,”

Translation: "You can't just slap our product into any job and make infinite money, which means our pitch was a lie. And the bottom is going to drop out of the speculation once this is more widely known. In order to stave that off, what we have to do is spook people enough that they let us slow down, we'll use our current position to try and stay afloat until we figure out if we can make good on the promise of turning capital into more money without workers."

Lol, thanks for the joke. Made me chuckle.