> Precisely how is OpenAI eating anyone's lunch? This is a serious question.

Because they made, maintain and offer GPT-4 which is currently the top-of-the-line LLM available. GPT-3 was also top-of-the-line when it launched, and they've proven they can iterate on the model and launch better ones.

Currently, both open and non-models are just about barely competitive with GPT-3.5, but none is close to GPT-4.

Even if they aren't profitable today, it's hard to imagine they won't be able to monetize things better, since their model is way ahead of any other model.

That is, they manage to get that far before the company collapses from the inside, which seems more and more likely everyday.