I think they've legitimately been fumbling the frontier race, but fortunately with not too much impact to their profits.

See for example the exodus of talent this year, triggered by mismanagement and politics. They still have a lot of talent but they've lost a lot.

Also, competition with Google Cloud for compute resources, less urgency and focus than the competitors, and (strange to say) not as much user LLM behavior data to feed to RL for coding, work, etc.

But I think they will keep catching up and stay relevant for a good class of LLM use cases.