And for some reason there's an entire industry (at least 3 different companies that I stumbled upon but likely many more?) who's main purpose seems to be creating a widget that is a wrapper for their API that is a wrapper for OpenAI or Gemini's API? Surely, that is either not profitable or will not be profitable long term right?

There's also at least one major city that has a public chat bot, New York (a few years ago they seemed to have gotten in trouble for telling businesses they were allowed to take tips from employees). But yes, it's public, so obviously suffers from the same fault that they all do.