It's a startup that evolved out of a community of people who found each other through common interests in open source machine learning for public good (i.e. eleuther and laion), committed to providing the public with access to ML tools that were otherwise gated by corporate paywalls. For several years, that work was all being done by volunteers in their free time. We're barely a year old as an actual company and we're not perfect. But as far as intentions and integrity go: you're talking about a group of people who were essentially already functioning as a volunteer run non-profit, and then were given the opportunity to continue that work with a salary, benefits, and resources.

If profit was our chief concern, we wouldn't be giving these models away for free. Simple as that. There're plenty of valid criticisms you could lob our way, but a lack of principles and greed aren't among them. You might not like the way we do things or certain choices we've made, but if you think the intentions behind those decisions is primarily profit motivated: you should really learn more about the people you are criticizing, because you couldn't be more misinformed.