It's more than rumors. There's enough information out there that you can make educated guesses about what it might be, and this article seems reasonable. There's lots of reasons to be interested in future research directions that well funded AI companies are taking, and a lot of those reasons start with dollar signs.
You don't need so-called educated guesses for that. Learning to plan is not a new concept; it's a general direction in the research field, and I bet everyone is working on something related. However, it's essentially just glorified search. If you can't find a perfect answer to the problem within 1 million[0] sampled generations, then I don't think a smarter search will help you.
The fact OpenAI wants to hype something right now is probably noteworthy.
Yes. Keep in mind that, aside from their former board, they probably employ a good PR firm.
That doesn't mean there's a significant product behind it. A good PR firm can freeze attrition promising the next big thing any minute now... at least for a while. And when the product comes out and it's good enough but not amazing like their GPT hits -- attrition avoided. (Not that OpenAI has an attrition problem, but not for lack of trying by the other big players.)
I would go so far as to say it's evidence there isn't - GPT-4 doesn't need hype beyond word of mouth, Q* is clearly not in that situation.
What did you see that made you think "OpenAI wants to hype something right now"? I didn't see anything coming from them except Altman saying the leak was "unfortunate". I don't believe they are generating any of the Q* hype.
Wether its worth it or not is a fair question, but one thing is for sure - people on social media, the internet in general (and actually just in real life too) LOVE talking and thinking about rumours.
Fresh content drives views drive $ + there will always be more rumors than facts = one can make more content (and therefore $) about rumors