It's not hopeless, but it requires so much money and time that you might as well surrender all hope. Competing with OpenAI is tough, finetuning llama to a point that it competed with GPT3.5 required several finetuning attempts and many months of research.

There's still room for more AI models, but competitive ones are remarkably difficult to build. Competing with OpenAI's thousands of GPUs is not an easy feat.