My first interpretation of this is that it's jazzed-up Chain-Of-Thought. The results look pretty promising, but i'm most interested in this:

> Therefore, after weighing multiple factors including user experience, competitive advantage, and the option to pursue the chain of thought monitoring, we have decided not to show the raw chains of thought to users.

Mentioning competitive advantage here signals to me that OpenAI believes there moat is evaporating. Past the business context, my gut reaction is this negatively impacts model usability, but i'm having a hard time putting my finger on why.