It's actually even less remarkable than that. It was an experiment in having a limited release, to shift the field toward a different release convention.
> Nearly a year ago we wrote in the OpenAI Charter: “we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research,” and we see this current work as potentially representing the early beginnings of such concerns, which we expect may grow over time.
> This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today, we believe that the AI community will eventually need to tackle the issue of publication norms in a thoughtful way in certain research areas.
> We will further publicly discuss this strategy in six months.
https://openai.com/research/better-language-models
