I don’t think OpenAI’s contribution should be so understated- they built a technology that was considered science fiction just a few years ago. They deserve all the credit for the “AI”.
We can now write software that interprets language under the hood (to some degree). The value propositions enabled by this change in the world are so vast, and partly so complex - to make absolute statements like "yeah but you don't control the model, so anyone can copy your solution" seems out of touch to me. What subset of technology doesn't get reverse engineered? Either this applies almost nowhere (because every piece of tech that an engineer can get their hands on is effectively open), or everywhere.
I would also add "distribution" to the "app and UX" part, but you can certainly build a valuable business upon an API "everyone else has access to" - plenty of companies out there that do that.
[0]https://twitter.com/englishpaulm/status/1623701758781558784
That doesn't mean that everything else in the stack is window dressing though - custom, domain specific wrangling with the different api endpoints, finding a satisfying prompt, temperature param etc. for specific tasks - the entire process of designing systems around an LLM-api has many intricacies to it, lots of which are completely uncharted territory.
I can assure you: very smart people are knees deep in this process, and they deserve the credit for their share of the value that is being created.
However, the "very very temporary space" might as well lead to momentum and a moat in a subdomain, and anyone who met a sufficiently large number of smart people knows that lots of them are very pragmatic, don't chase prestige, and enjoy laying ground work for future iterations.