Mid-level managers at a lot of companies still have no clue what LLMs are or how they work. These companies (like databricks) want to have their salespeople upsell such companies on "business AI." They have the base model in their back pocket just in case one of the customers in the room has heard the name Andrej Karpathy before and starts asking questions about how good their AI solution is... they can point to their model and its benchmarks to say "we know what we are doing with this AI stuff." It's just standard marketing stuff which works right now because of how difficult it is to actually objectively benchmark LLMs.
Yes. Great choice of words. A lot of non-frontier models look like "an exercise of pure marketing" to me.
Still, I fail to see the rationale for telling the world, "Look at us! We can do it too!"