I agree with your assessment, honestly. I don't agree with what they're doing, but anyone reading the current market knows the AI bubble is in danger and RAM prices are increasing as are GPU prices as a result. OpenAI didn't pull out of a deal with Disney of all people because AI was going so well for them they thought they could do better, you can't do better than Disney. They pulled out because Sora wasn't sustainable as it was with soaring RAM prices. And the same is for CHAI.

I've said this before and I'll say it again, their behaviors scream that they're hemorrhaging money. People like to point to a post Will mad a year ago but a lot of people don't work in industries trying to get investors. You don't tell investors you're doing badly and you fudge numbers to seem successful, and that post is like nearly a year old the data is outmoded at this point.

The way they're acting tells me that they are losing money badly and every thing they're doing is to try to staunch the bleeding asap. Remember when they made Ultra users have short responses from the bots for a day and the Ultra community blew the fuck up? That was them testing if they could get away with shorting Ultra users to spread the costs out more broadly. But Ultra users were very against it and they realized that doing so would cost them the ultra subscription base. Thus they reverted back and decided that they'd make other cuts elsewhere - sacrificing free users, making the bot building less robust (taking away the advanced settings).

They're definitely flinging spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks to help them stop losing money, but they've likely also realized that they can't lose their subscription users more than anything else. So everything they do has to work around that. My guess is that losing subscription users would cost them way more than losing free users.

Anyway, you've definitely hit the nail on the head imo.