It's not just the funding but the jobs themselves. Universities and even the funding bodies want to show shiny easy-to-digest numbers to their stakeholders to justify tuition and government funds. Which means these institutions in turn expect those numbers from their researchers, who then are happy to comply and build their paper mills and citation cartels, solving no real problems at best and producing fake data at worst.
Something that gets overlooked here is that most people will associate the early players for a particular kind of AI (OpenAI) with being at the forefront. Even if there are 100 competitors offering the same service with similar quality, sticking to the best-known provider gives confidence to enterprise buyers, especially when they have to explain the purchase to their bosses or shareholders. This, and the ability to attract and retain top talent, will continue to be an advantage of the early winners as long as they also continue to focus on pushing the boundaries and don't fall too far behind when competitors come up with new advances. Heck, they can even relax and cash out after a while and continue to reap the benefits, like IBM continues to do for enterprise computing even to this day despite (shamefully) not caring to be at the forefront anymore.
Click on the top link to understand what's going on. The point is that ChatGPT purportedly generated that nonsensical answer to a human prompt and Google somehow picked it up as the top search result for that query.
Never ever hire incompetent people who are beyond help, no matter how nice. What's the point? You are running a team that needs to perform. It's not a charity or a social club. By keeping incompetent people you send a horrible sign to the rest of the team and the team will crack under the stress.
Reject the notion that you can only find jerks to get the competency you need. Just be sure they are willing to work for the team. Some will be real nice, the rest will learn to get along. Make expectations very clear up front and be willing to fire for bad behavior.
This CNN article is about recovery fund fraud, not money laundering, and more importantly it highlights that only middle to small bank executives, and only lower level executives at too-big-to-fail banks, were punished.
That's usually the problem. There is virtually no competition within a state university system. Even in open markets, incumbents are bloated with bureaucracy and politics but succeed by digging trenches around them to keep new players out.