There's a good chance that they'll catch up. The "AI race" is a race to the bottom, with the leaders blowing huge wads of cash on capabilities that get replicated months later by the competition at a fraction of the cost.

The only benefit of leading is mindshare. OpenAI is doubling down on that, by investing in communication companies. That's their pathetic attempt at a "moat".

They catch up by distilling frontier models. They will eventually figure out how to prevent that from happening. No one has any interest in investing tens of billions if the product can be copied and sold for less.