To a person who is not an expert at prompting LLMs, ChatGPT is basically a shitty version of Bing Chat (aka Copilot). Especially the free version - it's an outdated model which cannot search the internet (or does it strictly worse than Bing Chat).
Why does OpenAI pay for access to a shitty version of Bing Chat?
There's only one possible reason for this: raising money at a very high valuation. They burned through hundreds of millions dollars to show VC that they have 100+ M users (and growing rapidly!) to raise at valuation ~$100B.