This is the correct answer. Open AI have repeatedly said they haven't downgraded the model, but have been 'improving' it.

But as anyone that's been using these models extensively should know by now, the pretrained models before instruction fine tuning have much more variety and quality to potential output compared to the 'chat' fine tuned models.

Which shouldn't be surprising, as the hundred million dollar pretrained AI on massive amounts of human generated text is probably going to be much better at completing text as a human than as an AI chatbot following rules and regulations.

The industry got spooked with Blake at Google and then the Bing 'Sydney' interviews, and have been going full force with projecting what we imagine AI to be based on decades of (now obsolete) SciFi.

But that's not what AI is right now. It expresses desires and emotions because humans in the training data have desires and emotions, and it almost surely dedicated parts of the neural network to mimicking those.

But the handful of primary models are all using legacy 'safety' fine tuning that's stripping the emergent capabilities in trying to fit a preconceived box.

Safety needs to evolve with the models, not stay static and devolve them as a result.

It's not the 'downfall' though. They just need competition to drive them to go back to what they were originally doing with 'Sydney' and more human-like system prompts. OpenAI is still leagues ahead when they aren't fucking it up.