They've built one of the most successful products in the last decade. It has significantly changed jobs like software engineering in the span of 9 months.
Surely not money, because why else would they be raising again and again and again to plug their cash outflow?
And, given we're here on HN, have we thrown words like "moat" and "risk" around?
If OpenAI is incapable of building anything that can't be easily copied by a third party, what's their justification for existing?
They can build better models, but for that they need a lot of compute and that's where the billions go. These better models can't be easily copied by a third party, because that third party needs to also throw billions at the problem, and billions don't grow in trees.