OpenAI have been consistently ahead of everyone but the others are not far behind. Everyone is seeing the dollar signs, so I'm sure all big players are dedicating massive resources to create their own models.
Yes. Language and image models are fairly different, but when you look at dall-e 2 (and dall-e earlier) that blew many people's mind when they came out, they have now been really eclipsed in term of popularity by Midjourney and stablediffusion.
