ChatGPT was free to the public because it was a toy for a conference. They didn't expect it to be popular because it was basically already available in Playgrou

ChatGPT was free to the public because it was a toy for a conference. They didn't expect it to be popular because it was basically already available in Playground for months. I think 4o is free because GPT3.5 was so relatively bad it means people are constantly claiming LLMs can't do things that 4 does just fine.