Nah - GPT-4 is crazy expensive, paying 20$/mo only get's you 25messages/3hours and it's crazy slow. The api is rather expensive too.
I'm pretty sure that GPT-4 is ~1T-2T parameters, and they're struggling to run it(at reasonable performance and profit). So far their strategy has been to 10x the parameter count every GPT generation, and the problem is that there's diminishing returns everytime they do that. AFAIK they've now resorted to chunking GPT through the GPUs because of the 2 to 4 terabytes of VRAM required (at 16bit).
So now they've reached the edge of what they can reasonably run, and even if they do 10x it the expected gains are less. On top of this, models like LLaMa have shown that it's possible to cut the parameter count substantially and still get decent results (albiet the opensource stuff still hasn't caught up).
On top of all of this, keep in mind that at 8bit resolution 175B parameters (GBPT3.5) requires over 175GB of VRAM. This is crazy expensive and would never fit on consumer devices. Even if you use quantization and use 4bit, you still need over 80GB of VRAM.
This definitely is not a "throw them off the trail" tactic - in order for this to actually scale the way everyone envisions both in performance and running on consumer devices - research HAS to be on improving the parameter count. And again there's lots of research showing its very possible to do.
tl;dr: smaller = cheaper+faster+more accessible+same performance