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.

I can totally see them nerfing their public models.

Just beat the current winner by enough to own the spotlight for a bit, then start prepping for the next go round.