Something that I've found worth pointing out to other builders is that you don't need to build an AI product outright to sell to consumers (re: your comment about your ideas being gobbled up by big tech). Building internal AI/ML tools to solve your own business/workflow/whatever problems is often the better route for folks to leverage the advances in that technology. The best AI you build is likely the one your users don't even know exists.
This also has a beneficial side effect of showing you first-hand just how bad this tooling is currently and how far away it is from replacing builders wholesale. And to be clear, I'm not just talking about leveraging closed proprietary APIs for these efforts, I'm actually more referring to building your own training and inference stacks from scratch. The pedagogical impact alone can make up most of the ROI for your time spent.