Any company could do that. If it would make sense for them to do that would depend on the market they were entering though. At the time OpenAI came about companies weren't sharing (selling) AI to the world. Doing so was a point of differentiation. There's Google over there hoarding all of their AI for themselves. Here's us over here providing APIs and free chat interfaces to the general public.

So sure the name means nothing now in a market shaped by OpenAI, where everyone offers APIs and has chat interfaces. It doesn't mean it meant nothing when they picked it or that they abandoned the meaning. The landscape just changed.