Probably doing it because they think people want higher quality videos, but you're right it'll cost them a lot of money.
The 4k version of OP video is using 3.5 GiB. Maybe ten copies with redundancy and in different datacenters, that's maybe $0.30 in hard drive space. That's going to add up if they upscale lots of their 1080p to 4k. Also electricity and upscale AI isn't free, and they'll be redoing this over and over as the upscale models improve.
It's probably not actually a nefarious master plan to make people doubt everything. They're just looking at micro metric A/B testing saying "which vid do you prefer" and the mechanical turks they ask say the upscale because less blurry.
...but still hilarious that in the longer term they're undermining themselves because nobody asked, "yeah but should we do this?"
Probably doing it because they think people want higher quality videos, but you're right it'll cost them a lot of money.
The 4k version of OP video is using 3.5 GiB. Maybe ten copies with redundancy and in different datacenters, that's maybe $0.30 in hard drive space. That's going to add up if they upscale lots of their 1080p to 4k. Also electricity and upscale AI isn't free, and they'll be redoing this over and over as the upscale models improve.
It's probably not actually a nefarious master plan to make people doubt everything. They're just looking at micro metric A/B testing saying "which vid do you prefer" and the mechanical turks they ask say the upscale because less blurry.
...but still hilarious that in the longer term they're undermining themselves because nobody asked, "yeah but should we do this?"