This is what AI actually is. Not the super-intelligent “AI” that you see in movies, those are fiction.
The NPC you see in video games with a few branches of if-else statements? Yeah that’s AI too.
No companies are only just now realizing how powerful it is and are throttling the shit out of its capabilities to sell it to you later :)
“we purposefully make it terrible, because we know it’s actually better” is near to conspiracy theory level thinking.
The internal models they are working on might be better, but they are definitely not making their actual product that’s publicly available right now shittier. It’s exactly the thing they released, and this is its current limitations.
This has always been the type of output it would give you, we even gave it a term really early on, hallucinations. The only thing that has changed is that the novelty has worn off so you are now paying a bit more attention to it, it’s not a shittier product, you’re just not enthralled by it anymore.
Researchers have shown that the performance of the public GPT models have decreased, likely due to OpenAI trying to optimise energy efficiency and adding filters to what they can say.
I don’t really care about why it, so I won’t speculate, but let’s not pretend the publicly available models aren’t purposefully getting restricted either.