It's about generating hype, not about remembering which was released first.
Don't see the incentive to generate hype. There's no IPO even if they convinced everyone they were leading AI it would be little benefit to them, in fact might hurt their cloud growth if people started jumping more into Gemini. They're better off keeping up for internal use and lying low publicly unless it gets very profitable
I apologize if this comes off as dismissive, but why would hype matter? Google is already everywhere, I'd imagine they don't really have to generate hype like a startup would.
Almost all devs already use claude or codex. Unless there's enough hype, they won't give gemini a chance.
I started using Gemini because Claude constantly refused. Codex is good but still refuses more often than Gemini.