If Apple wasn't selling privacy, I'd assume the other way around. Or if anything, OpenAI would give the service out for free. There's a reason why ChatGPT became free to the public, GPT-4o moreover. It's obvious that OpenAI needs whatever data it can get its hands on to train GPT-5.
ChatGPT was free to the public because it was a toy for a conference. They didn't expect it to be popular because it was basically already available in Playground for months.
I think 4o is free because GPT3.5 was so relatively bad it means people are constantly claiming LLMs can't do things that 4 does just fine.
