Stealth launch: builds hype, allows them to collect user preference data and see where the model fails. Why people care: it's free, decent, and people love a good mystery.

I think the blind test is valuable. To what degree is our impression of a model affected by who created it?

I think there was some loud speculation is was Google. It's cool people can pretty definitively show it's not. But also maybe Google is being crazy sneaky and faking it! (Joking)

I think the stranger thing is that people spend tens of hours doing analysis like this to hit an inevitably-expiring hype cycle that will give us a definitive answer shortly.

It's decent. How good depends on compute needs.