India in this context is a synecdoche for scaling consumer vs Anthropic's more enterprise-y route, but yes that's pretty much why we didn't get 4.5 with reasoning. Without reasoning, 4.5 had no future.

From Sam Altman himself:

> We had this big GPU crunch. We could go make another giant model. We could go make that, and a lot of people would want to use it, and we would disappoint them. And so we said, let’s make a really smart, really useful model, but also let’s try to optimize for inference cost. And I think we did a great job with that.

4.5 scaled into a unified reasoning model would have been an incredible model. It beat GPT-5 on accuracy and hallucinations without reasoning (!)

It just wouldn't have worked for powering things like ChatGPT Go's rollout and loginless chatgpt.com, so they dropped it.

(And if you want, you could argue it's the compute crunch that didn't let them do both... but Anthropic had to make the same choices at the time and went in the other direction.)

This all sounds like pure speculation to me. GPT4.5 was ok but not spectacular. The whole marketing was based on "vibes" and how interacting with it "felt more natural" etc. If there was actual use case for this model, I do not see why it would not be just offered for higher end subscriptions or through API. Other expensive models at the time, eg o1/o3 pro, were not served in the free tier, but only in paid subscriptions and apis, but that one did have use cases, so they did keep it at the time, until they prob took a more unified approach with their models. So I do not see why they could not have done something similar with 4.5 if it was an actually good model.

And I am not sure that Altmat's statements are worth taking into account. His statements are more about marketing and turning things in his favour rather than speaking the truth.