OpenAI was just first out of the gates, there'll always be some company that's first, essence is how they handle their leadership, and they've sadly been absolutely terrible and scummy.
Actually i think Google was a pretty good example of the exact opposite, decades of "actually not being evil", while openAI switched up 1 second after launch.
Google's overwhelming victory in search had ~ nothing to do with marketing.
There was a time when Google was thought of as a respectable, high-quality, smart and nimble company. That has faded as the marketing grew.
What is your point? OpenAI wasn’t the first out of that gate as your own argument cites Google prior. All these companies are predatory, who is arguing against that? OP said OpenAi was irrelevant. That’s just dumb. They are not. Feel free to advance an argument in favor of that narrative if you wish as I was just trying to provide a single example that shows that some of these lightweight models are building directly off the backs of giants spending the big money. I find nothing wrong with distillation and am excited about companies like DeepSeek.