At this point, the entire AI industry seems to just copy OpenAI for the most part. I cannot help but notice that we have the same services just offered by different companies. The amount of innovation in this build is not that high actually.
Well, OpenAI copied the Deep Research feature from Google. They even used the same name (as does Mistral).
All of the major labs are innovating and copying one another.
Anthropic has all of the other labs trying to come up with an "agentic" protocol of their own. They also seem to be way ahead on interpretability research
Deepseek came up with multi-headed latent attention, and publishing an open-source model that's huge and SOTA.
Deepmind's way ahead on world models
...
They've recently removed (limited) use of it from the free plan, so I guess it was costing more than they were making from paid subscribers
This used to be a good example of innovation that is hard to copy. But it doesn't apply anymore for two reasons:
1. Apple went from being an agile, pro-developers, creative company to an Oracle-style old-board milking-cow company; not much innovation is happening at Apple anymore.
2. To their surprise, much of what they call "innovative" is actually pretty easy to replicate on other platforms. It took 4 hours for Flutter folks to re-create Liquid Glass...
Steve Jobs did say they "patented the hell out of [the iPhone]" and went about saber-rattling, then came the patent wars which proved that Apple also rely on innovation by others, and that patent workarounds would still result in competitive products, and things calmed down afterwards.