Embeddings are still important (context windows can't contain all data + memorization and continuous retraining is not yet viable), and vertical AI agent startups can still lead on UX.
Separate embedding DBs are less important if you are working with OpenAI, since their Assistants API exists to (among other things) let you bring in additional data and let them worry about parsing it, storing it, and doing RAG with it. Its like "serverless", but for Vector DBs and RAG implementations instead of servers.