If OpenAI didn't offer high compensation, then it wouldn't have been able to attract the talent that it did.

Feel free to run your company off of Doge coin donations from EA orgs if you like.

But personally, I don't think anyone would have been able to make the frontier models that OpenAI did even if SBF himself funded the whole thing.

To actually succeed in the space you need money, top talent, and GPUs. And you can't get that if your plan is to shutdown the company.