At the moment of writing the article (I don't know if it's still the case), o1 was a paid model. This means that a technology that was free for 1+ years is now sold by OpenAI for money, which to me personally does seem like a scam.

Not only that, they could have implemented it in a better way ( for example adding possibility to do research during thinking process - like searching the internet and accessing documents, or give the model ability to self-reflect on thoughts, and many other things.), but we can't really say much here because OpenAI didn't reveal any details about what exactly they implemented.