First of all, if Altman continually makes misleading statements about AI he will quickly lose credibility, and that short term gain in whatever 'financial incentive' that birthed the lie would be eroded in short order by a lack of trust of the head of one of the most visible AI companies in the world.

Secondly, all the competitors of OpenAI can plainly assess the truth or validity of Altman's statements. There are many companies working in tandem on things at the OpenAI scale of models, and they can independently assess the usefulness of continually growing models. They aren't going to take this statement at face value and change their strategy based on a single statement by OpenAI's CEO.

Thirdly, I think people aren't really reading what Altman actually said very closely. He doesn't say that larger models aren't useful at all, but that the next sea change in AI won't be models which are orders of magnitude bigger, but rather a different approach to existing problem sets. Which is an entirely reasonable prediction to make, even if it doesn't turn out to be true.

All in all, "his word is basically worthless" seems much to harsh an assessment here.