Ask HN: What would the state of AI be if OpenAI never existed?

I feel like every big push in generative AI over the last 3 years has just been copying OpenAI. Google obviously had Transformers first and has done its own stuff, but until GPT-3 no one else ever considered them seriously, and likewise until Dalle no one considered image generation a valuable route to take.

Would we be in an AI winter without their leadership, or did they just give the industry a "push" that would have happened a few years later otherwise?