That's a convenient explanation that's been repeated over and over by certain people, but cost is a much more likely explanation: inference for large models is

That's a convenient explanation that's been repeated over and over by certain people, but cost is a much more likely explanation: inference for large models is extraordinarily expensive when you have millions of users and their pricing model always seemed way too low to pay for that. They have likely been subsidizing their users since the launch of their commercial offering (and this is pretty common strategy for SV startups) but they've been so successful that they now need to scale the cost down in order not to burn all their cash too fast.