To be honest that whole thing sounds like advertisement to me: "got out of the box and became more intelligent". The AI hype has created the biggest bubble ever and that bubble needs to grow a lot bigger for the companies that have been hemorrhaging money and not making any profit, to be able to attract more capital. Expect more stories like these in the near future until either they turn huge profits or the bubble pops catastrophically...
Hmm, this is possible too, but I didn't think this way. And, only in case, if your words are correct, this may be a stunt for OpenAI company branding to catch the public attention. This may be because a lot of users are shifting to using other AIs like ClaudeAI. Haha, so maybe this is possible to get those users' attention.
It's more than possible, this kind of headline attracts attention from all sides... even people who don't like it will talk about it. I guess we can say it's an AI race, and every company wants to dominate the headlines... As they say goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
And as Pooya wrote, they are spending so much money on this AI, money from governments, other investments, and they don't make any profit yet. So they need to talk about it, and make it looks like something is happening...