I don't know if this is going to emerge as a monopoly, and likely won't, but for whatever reason, openai and anthropic have been several months ahead of everyone else for quite some time.
Segment Anything 2 is fantastic- but less mysterious because its open source. NotebookLM is amazing, but nobody is rushing to create benchmarks for it. AlphaFold is never going to be used by consumers like ChatGPT.
OpenAI is certainly competitive, but they also work overtime to hype everything they produce as "one step closer to the singularity" in a way that the others don't.
They aren't letting anyone external have access to their top end products either. Google invented transformers and kept the field stagnant for 5 years because they were afraid it would eat into their search monopoly.