I appreciate the idea of being a "not-greedy typical company," but there's a reason you e.g. separate university type research or non-profits and private companies.
Trying to make up something in the middle is the exact sort of naivete you can ALWAYS expect from Silicon Valley.
So I would say ChatGPT exists because its creators specifically transgressed the traditional division of universities vs industry. The fact that this transgressive structure is unstable is not surprising, at least in retrospect.
Indeed, the only other approach I can think of is a massive government project. But again with gov't bureaucracy, a researcher would be limited by legal issues of big data vs copyright, etc.--which many have pointed out that OpenAI again was able to circumvent when they basically used the entire Internet and all of humanity's books, etc., as their training source.