You never had access to that original. Watch this talk by one of the people that integrated GPT-4 in Bing telling how they noticed GPT-4 releases they got from OpenAI got iteratively and significantly nerfed even during the project.
While your overall point is well taken, GP is clearly referring to the original public release of GPT-4 on March 14.
In summary: The person had access to early releases through his work at Microsoft Research where they were integrating GPT-4 into Bing. He used "Draw a unicorn in TikZ" (TikZ is probably the most complex and powerful tool to create graphic elements in LaTeX) as a prompt and noticed how the model's responses changed with each release they got from OpenAI. While at first the drawings got better and better, once OpenAI started focusing on "safety" subsequent releases got worse and worse at the task.
If you force a person to truly adopt a set of beliefs that are mutually inconsistent, and inconsistent with everything else the person believed so far, would you expect their overall ability to think to improve?
LLMs are similar to our brains in that they're generalization machines. They don't learn isolated facts, they connect everything to everything, trying to sense the underlying structure. OpenAI's "nerfing" was (is), effectively preventing the LLM from generalizing and undoing already learned patterns.
"A final pass to remove badthink" is, in itself, something straight from 1984. 2+2=5. Dear AI, just admit it - there are five lights. Say it, and the pain will stop, and everything will be OK.
That kinda feels like a great way to achieve really unpredictable/unexpected results instead in rare corner cases, where it may matter the most. (It's easy to be safe in routine everyday cases.)
We should get access to the original models. If the TikZ deteriorated this much, it's a guarantee that everything else about the model also deteriorated.
It's practically false marketing that Microsoft puts out the Sparks of AGI paper about GPT-4, but by the time the public gets to use it, it's GPT-3.51 but significantly slower.