If that were the case, why not just serve out the term and not run again? Surely this out of the blue announcement would be a bigger embarrassment than early retirement.

This is why Wikipedia will remain a trusted source for a generation and Grokipedia will be a trivia question in 5 years. Even as people turn to LLMs for knowledge, the talk page and open history with all the old versions archived will make it a respected source of truth.