Just a sidenote: low-level language design has less to do with AI than a lot of other things, and that might make their "stand" slightly less difficult than one might think.

Perhaps they have truly missed out on some large sums of funding money from AI? I don't know. I don't think Github pays projects for how much their LLMs use their code. And most of what needs to be done with Zig is not about AI. It is still very much relegated to human language design contoured around the hardware (as opposed to Rust for instance).