> introduced to competitors in the AI space and suddenly OpenAI's success felt a lot less inevitable.

This is true. OpenAI WAS the story of AI, now it is just 50% of it, at max. Losing the monopoly of imagination towards AGI is bad for them.

One thing I don't agree though, consumers aren't the important part of AI, they are a liability.

AI is too expensive, consumers can't pay for it. Instead they will compete with enterprise for the same tokens, with less money.