I don't believe they will be able to compete with Google/OpenAI in a direct battle
I don't know about that. From my experience, community AI models (both image generation and LLMs) are often far, far superior to whatever large corporations can dish out within the same size bracket

The biggest issue for last ~8 years was that wayland was promoted as "superior" while lacking even most basic functions.
V-Sync control? Nope. Hidpi scaling? Nope. Only in 2024 it got to the point where it's actually usable and these features were implemented.