My money is on this as well. Their model improvements are getting more marginal over time, they have no moat, Anthropic is moving past them and apart from software engineering and a few tech fields LLMs fail to deliver business value.

So the “slowing down” narrative is a convenient story to spin.

They don't deliver business value in software engineering either. It gives the _illusion_ of increased productivity, but a machine that drives your engineers to burnout in exchange for more code shipped that's still bottlenecked at all the other stages of software development is not a winning strategy.

The entire AI market is propped up on the hope that the models will magically solve all of these problems, and now that even Altman is realising they won't he needs the slowdown to stave of the crash for as long as he can.