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.