You can just skip the clearly marked ad bit and read the rest of it. Jason Pargin makes a lot of good content on different channels, and throws in a book plug here and there. Doesn't diminish the quality of his writing in any way.
I'm purely guessing, but they may be following the "early adopters pay premium price" model. Which means that there'd be a price drop in the fall, probably accompanied by a new model so that whoever bought the initial one stays happy.
Well, the fun part is that the algorithms themselves are deterministic. They are just so afraid of model distillation that they force some randomness on top (and now hide thinking). Arguably for coding, you'd probably want temperature=0, and any variation would be dependent on token input alone.
This is clearly about censorship, as anyone living outside of the United States can see. It's actually pretty obvious that they're banning the one platform where US oligarchs have no say over what goes viral and what doesn't.