The way it is right now is to build giga-monster models, use those internally to boost yourself, and distill them down into lighter consumer models.

Apparently OAI is already building GPT7 and GPT8

with how much competition, benchmaxxing, and increased compute for inference, I can't imagine that they are intentionally nerfing their own public models for any reason other than that they can't figure out how to package it into something the public can use. The training data for all these frontier models goes well into 2026 at this point.