my 8 year old knows what ChatGPT is but has never heard of any other LLM (or OpenAI for that matter). They're all "chatGPT" in the same way that refers to searching the internet as "googling" (and is unaware of Bing, DDG or any other search engine).
I think it shows really well how OpenAI was caught off guard when Chat GPT got popular and proved to be unexpectedly useful for a lot of people. They just gave it a technical name for what it was, a Generative Pre-trained Transformer model that was fine tuned for chat style interaction. If they had any plans on making a product close to what it is today they would have given it a catchier name. And now they're kind of stuck with it.
Well they cant come up with version names that stand out in any way so I dont expect them to give their core product a better name anytime soon. I wish they would spend a little time this, but i guess they are too busy building?
I’ve heard plenty of people call any chatbot “chat gpt” - it’s becoming a genericized household name.