Earlier quoted context omitted.
Altman said in the latest Lex Friedman podcast that OAI has consistently received feedback their releases "shock the world", and that they'd like to fix that. I think releasing to this 3rd party so the internet can start chattering about it and discovering new functionality several months before an official release aligns with that goal of drip-feeding society incremental updates instead of big new releases.
They did the same with GPT-4, they were sitting on it for months not knowing how to release. Ended up releasing GPT-3.5 and releasing 4 quietly after nerfing 3.5 into a turbo. OpenAI sucks at naming though. GPT2 now? Their specific gpt-4-314 etc. model naming was also a mess.
Maybe they got help from Microsoft?