OpenAI's mistake may have been "planning to have a business model;" the alternative they should have gone with was "Instead of taking investor money with promises of some kind of return, be a hedge fund manager, make $100 million, and then set $600,000 on fire with no plan to recoup the cost because it's play-money to you."
When that figure came out, the popular talking point was how cheap Stable Diffusion cost to make and how easily a well-funded competitor could create their own custom variant.
The founder said that this is not quite as possible with most public clouds and that it is easier to buy the GPUs.
Unsurprisingly, Pornhub is already using machine learning. Their first big project is colorizing and upscaling classic porn.[1] (Moderately NSFW). As they point out, they have plenty of training data.
That seems a bit cynical. While SD's creator might not recoup that money directly, a lot of end users have benefited from its creation. That money has figuratively gone up in flames no more than the time or labor cost of an open source developer whose code is used by millions of people, IMO.
OpenAI wouldn't have been able to do what StabilityAI did because OpenAI is incentivized to make return on investment; Mohammad Emad Mostaque is not.
Moreover, there are very rich people already, like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, funding projects for doing good like world hunger, education and "AI Safety". And Open AI was a project of this sort of thing, originally. The thing is that even very rich people demand that the enterprises they give money to be as self-supporting as possible and their money is spread fairly thin. The only way Open AI could become an AI development shop, employing many top developers, was to have the financing level of a commercial company. Which means it constantly puts out products that don't seem like they can make money because AI algorithms don't seem to controllable - Open AI seems to only be able to have the first implementation of X, not the best implementation. Once the basic idea is out, someone else can produce a similar thing with a budget that doesn't include a research team.
Somewhat tangentially, I speculate that crowd-sourced training will become a thing.