It’s more like you spend 4 years developing a product you’re passionate about. This product will gain you the respect of all your colleagues and either earn you money directly or lead to great career advancements. Then OpenAI takes it, changes the colour scheme, finishes the login flow and claims the whole thing as their own.
Not only would it piss you off but it would also misrepresent what OpenAIs models are capable of.
If I have infinite money to progress whatever problem solution I want but I always wait until I have an unfair advantage to get credit for whatever problem was just at the brink of a breakthrough anyway by sniping the last steps. Am I actually doing a good thing or would it be better to let it run it's natural course and spend the money somewhere it's actually needed?
The thing is, everyone knows that Apple does that and Apple doesn't care if people have a beef with them.
It's also systemic, it cuts off the supply of results, if there is no reward any more for getting a result, the pipeline of maths will stop. It is the snake eating itself, which has a bad impact for all of us.
The problem is that AI is capital, and having to rent AI to keep up when it can just steal your mostly done work is something somehow even lower than wage-labor. They can use your own risked investment (the cash you paid to work) to get out in front of you and take credit.
I have yet to trust LLMs with anything important that can be capitalized on. I only use it to work on projects that if they stole and expanded on them, I'd actually be happy to see.