This. They want to create hype around large scale model so that they can ask for lots of money to fund this line of research.

Except that I don't think it's targeted at the general public. Rather it's targeted at grant agencies and University administration who are usually extremely myopic and conservative about funding projects that require a large upfront investment (unlike companies like openai).

In fact, I'm sure tons of people in academia are going to be pointing to this paper from now on when writing grants and asking for funding for large scale machine learning projects. Especially because of the credibility lent to it by Stanford and the people who put their names on the paper.

So it's more like a research manifesto for the field.