If your premise is OpenAI has "launch(ed) something that nobody else can" then the whole argument falls apart.
No one else wanted to, because of the PR storms associated with this tech. (Tay for MS, and consider "Google fires software engineer who claims AI chatbot is sentient").
All OpenAI did was a relativity trivial (in competitive terms) software-engineering pass over the system to provide the tool in user-friendly and PR-friendly ways.
The idea that google, apple, etc. etc. couldnt create anything at OpenAI is clearly absurd. The relevant "AI" here is just rube-goldberg varations on a dot-product computed over the entire internet; any one can do it.
As The Dude once said... that's just, like, your opinion, man.
I'm confident that you have reasons for holding the position that you hold, but you're not actually offering anything beyond "if something different is possible in the future, one of the incumbents of today would have done it".
The simple fact is that OpenAI beat today's current players to market in every meaningful dimension, and we will have to agree to disagree that Google/Apple held back for fear of short-term PR blowback.
What is Apple but a company that prides themselves on doing things that everyone freaks out about, like ditching the floppy, CD-ROM, headphone jack?
All the companies in question have developed this technology internally, but found no way of making it PR-releasable. There's plenty of evidence to this effect: since MS/Fb/Gggl either have news stores about their internal products or have released one to massive negative PR.
They found no way of reliably making it non-racist, and reliably making it's "advice", "safe to trust", and so on.
What OpenAI "innovated" was an interface over an ensemble of techniques that managed to (1) provide an interface where "made-up" answers seem acceptable; and (2) severely censor and limit what users could do --- and massive teams of people modifying the system post-release to ensure it was robust to those uses.
A start-up has an asymmetric risk of bad PR compared to a tech giant; hence why they were the first to market. It doesnt matter if people exploit the system (etc.) since there's no brand perception wherein they're expected to somehow have prevented people from doing so.
Compare a small social network app with facebook. "Somehow" facebook is expected to have control over human nature to supernatural degrees, or else, "they're evil". Few other such companies are treated this way.
^ this is what stops tech giants releasing this stuff.
No one wants to be the "facebook of chatbots", somehow responsible for human nature, and somehow expected to create a perfect product which can somehow know everything except racism, sexism,etc.
Could the moat be speed? First mover advantage has proved to be a huge factor in the past. Share of mind, messaging, audience loyalty, eyeballs, etc. ?
Blackberry created an industry and made hundreds of billions of dollars before resting on its laurels and getting derailed by internal battles over direction. There are still huge numbers of people that would buy a modern BB device today if they could.
The notion that BB didn't have massive levels of success due to their first-mover advantage is simply wrong. Of course, I would also suggest that BB was a network effects driven company; I wasn't a customer, but they offered the original (mobile) walled-garden group chat system.
Bigger picture, while lots of companies succeed entering crowded markets with new innovations, I also know that if you could somehow offer founders a choice between being first mover and, I dunno, getting 10% of their first round equity back, probably 100% of the founders would opt to capture the market first.
The "early access to the next versions of the OpenAI models" is the only important detail in this arrangement.
The most obvious signal so far is Bing/Sydney chat freaking out Google so much that they rushed a Bard demo that shit the bed.
$1M may be enough that a quality founding team can get a first iteration out the door without having to distract themselves with fundraising.
Essentially, this makes OpenAI a kingmaker. The $1M is just icing. The cake is being able to launch something that nobody else can.