Yes, people turned a blind eye towards OpenAI because they were supposedly an "open" non-profit company working towards the benefit of humanity. They got tons of top talent and investment because of this. The crazy part is that they knew they weren't gonna keep it non-profit based on the internal chat revealed in Elon Musk's lawsuit. They duped the whole world and now just trying to make as much money as possible.
In my opinion, if they were to release these models openly and everyone had equal opportunity to benefit from their research (just like the previous research their current stuff is based on), they could be excused but this for-profit business model is the main problem.
When you say previous model, you mean gemini with alpha geometry (an actual RL method)? Which scored a silver?
I mean not only google did it before, they also released their details unlike openai's "just trust me bro, its RL".
Openai also said that we should reserve 25k tokens for this "reasoning" and they will be charged the same as output tokens which is exorbitantly high (60$ for 1m tokens).
And the cherry on top is that they won't even give us these "reasoning" tokens. How the hell am I supposed to improve my prompts if I can't even see it? How would I reduce the hallucinations without it?
My personal experience is that, it does have an extra reasoning thing going for itself but in no way does it make openai's tactics tolerable. The quality does not increase enough to justify its cost per token, let alone their "reasoning tokens" BS.