I’m convinced this is group hallucination. It must be so interesting to work at OpenAI, knowing you didn’t change a thing, and seeing that because of random chance, some small fraction of 100M users have all tricked each other that suddenly, something is different.
It's not surprising, they were probably running the model at a huge and ultimately unacceptable loss. But they should really offer a higher paid tier to access the previous capabilities... not drop them entirely. Many would pay far more than $20/month to access a marginally but meaningfully better model.
EDIT: Many being dismissive of LLMs don't even seem to use them. Providers are vastly overvalued from an investment perspective, but the utility is very real. To say the loss in capability is just an "illusion" is clearly wrong to anybody who actually uses it.