OpenAI cannot make every product and market them to every segment. If you wrap their API and provide a novel UX with precise positioning, there's value there.
OpenAI can copy the underlying collection of features tomorrow morning, but if the positioning is precise enough, you will easily outcompete them.
For an example developers can understand, see managed SaaS: which is a collection of companies raking in billions in revenue from simply wrapping AWS/GCP/Azure in ways that the underlying platforms even end up copying anyways but succeeding because their developer experience is better, or their feature set is better focused, or they're just plain nicer to work with.
Even if OpenAI doesn't, if its a thin wrapper with no deep proprietary edge, someone else can; your offering is ripe for commodification, even if that doesn't come from OpenAI themselves.
That's why "technical novelty" ranks ridiculously low on scale of things that make most successful software businesses these days: if anything technical novelty is more of an albatross on most software businesses than a saving grace.
Building traction in software is more about the 100s of other concerns that apply to every business: brand recognition, communicating your value proposition effectively, being able to sell to the target customer effectively, having the correct UX, the right proofs, the list goes on.
Copying that is just as hard as ever, if not harder.
Not convinced. Why did Google beat Yahoo? Why is Facebook huge while Friendster and Myspace are jokes? At some point - perhaps further down the line than most of us are used to thinking of - technical ability matters.
And even Facebook definitely didn't win because if some technical choice... no one cared what tech stack powered a social media site, and if anything Facebook was less advanced than MySpace as far as users were concerned.
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If you're talking about how it matters further down the line, then you're walking away from the wrapper thesis too: the whole line being parroted is that it's just an API wrapper ripe for the copying. Good luck getting to the "further down the line" reliably as a company, let alone down the line and then killing your competitor with a game plan that mostly consists of copying them.
There is no moat. Anything even moderately profitable will be implemented in 4 hours by the whales.
There’s a difference between having competition and having a business that can be trivially cloned. The challenge for a lot of AI startups is to show that they are adding something and are not just a dumb wrapper.
This point of view is too simplistic, not everything needs to be a billion dollar idea or differentiated. You can make an absolute good living with no moat and good product senses. Even if you get outgunned, you move on to the next opportunity.