PR is important for getting investor money, which is important for building infrastructure and AGI, I don't think they're spending millions on pure math for fun.
OpenAI don't seem to have much direction. First they seemed to be concentrating on consumer with ChatGPT, while also pursuing things like image and video generation, about to get into porn (sex-chat), then they suddenly woke up to Anthropic owning the much more lucrative business/API and coding markets and dropped those distractions to compete with Anthropic instead. The whole Navier-Stokes PR debacle was also due to focusing on Anthropic (who they had heard rumor had solved it), maybe also in part jealous of DeepMind's positive AI-for-science press.
So, is this (poorly conceived) PR a rational attempt to boost investment, or more of a case of paying too much attention to the competition?