honestly a power move.

it's almost as if they don't care about creating a proper buzz.

From what I understand, isn’t DeepSeek just a pet project from a Chinese hedge fund? They have much less reason to create a buzz compared to openAI, Anthropic, or Google.

None of those players you mention actually need to create a buzz. People will do it for them for free. DeepSeek joined this group after releasing R1.

Despite constant protestations of hype among the tech crowd, GenAI really is big enough of a deal that new developments don't need to be pushed onto market; people are voluntarily seeking them out.

Well OpenAI is constantly asking for and raising money. If “buzz” isn’t the right word maybe mystique? Because “race to the bottom in a hyper-commoditized space” probably doesn’t get you billions. No, Sam Altman wants people to believe they are very close to AGI and a TAM of global GDP.

OpenAI does a lot of work hyping themselves up and creating buzz around things they do or have a vague idea that they might try to do in the future.

Not to make people aware of GenAI, but to make sure OpenAI continues to be perceived as the AI company. The company that leads and revolutionizes, with everyone just copying them and trying to match them. That perception is a significant part of their value and probably their biggest moat

Considering just how quickly others followed it's also obviously not the case. Infact the best AI software as in most useful is not theirs. Claude is far more reliable.

Only goes to shown how strong their brand already is in the eyes of the public. I question how much active maintenance it takes, though. In my eyes, they already won big with ChatGPT - the name still is synonymous with LLMs to the general population. Everyone knows what ChatGPT is. Few known what Claude or Gemini is; arguably, more people know what Deepseek is thanks to the splash they made tanking NVidia stock and becoming part of general news coverage for a few days. Still, for regular folks (including business folks in tech industry, too), they all are, respectively, "that other ChatGPT", "ChatGPT from Google" and "that Chinese ChatGPT". It's a pretty sticky perception.