I've been paying for GPT-4 since 3 hours after its release. The decrease in quality was noticeable just one week later (on top of the cap changes from 50 messages every 4 hours to 25 messages every 3 hours) I originally assumed that this was due to the increase in demand. It never went back to being as sharp as it was during those first hours of usage
Are you sure it wasn't just that the novelty wore off after a few hours of usage? I never really got into LLMs, but I must say at first it seemed like pretty cool stuff. OpenAI have repeatedly stated the model hasn't changed so how could this happen otherwise?
From my point of view, it is sad that these sort of socio-political constructs (copyright) are hindering innovation. The funny thing is that in say, 10 years, the "pirate" version of LLMs will be way more powerful and useful than the "corporate" versions. Once the RIAA/MPAA has sued all of them preventing them of using their audio/video; after the editorials have sued them to prevent them from using their books and articles, and after every internet site has sued them to prevent them from using their text. LLM models trained on SciHub, Library Genesis and Torrents will be amazing in comparison.
I sincerely wish that some country would apply to information copyright a similar approach to what India does for medicine patents.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31852138 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36138930