Just to give a sense of scale: OpenAI started with a $1 billion donation, got another $1B as investment, and is now getting a larger investment from Microsoft (undisclosed but rumored to be $10B). Assuming they spent most of their previous funding, which seems likely, their operational costs are in the ballpark of $300 million per year. The idea that the WMF could just choose to create conversational software of a similar quality if it wanted seems detached from reality to me.