Those are certainly benefits, but it's most likely a prophylactic move.
LLMs will be (are?) a critical piece of infrastructure. Commoditizing that infrastructure ensures that firms like Google and Meta won't be dependent on any other (OpenAI) for access to that infrastructure.
Meta in particular has had this issue wrt Ads on iOS. And Google wrt paying Apple to be the default search engine.
See also: Joel Spoelsky's famous Strategy Letter V [0].
LLMs will be (are?) a critical piece of infrastructure. Commoditizing that infrastructure ensures that firms like Google and Meta won't be dependent on any other (OpenAI) for access to that infrastructure.
Meta in particular has had this issue wrt Ads on iOS. And Google wrt paying Apple to be the default search engine.
See also: Joel Spoelsky's famous Strategy Letter V [0].
[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/