I bet greed had much more impact than envy. Capitalims is, in a nutshell, gluttony applied to everything it can touch, and companies lust to make ever greater amounts of money or face the wrath of their shareholders. Innovation is hard, so copying your proud rivais is the easiest way (sloth, anyone?) to accomplish that...
We don't know. Maybe someone else would, maybe not. Before Chatgpt 3.5, ai was just a buzzword. It's a bigger buzzword now, but at least tech firms have large-language models that they can market.
