I get the idea that the OkCupid founders & investors did as well as they could with their dating business, and as a "byproduct" they built up a valuable representative database along the way.

Money was already being made off the dating alone, and the accumulating facial data was a no-cost item from the beginning.

Even though the data is mainly just a working foundation for the dating service, eventually the database got so big that lots of value could be extracted in other ways.

It would be difficult to put an exact dollar figure on the value of a database like that itself for sure.

And selling it could be considered unethical in some peoples' eyes, so those in control could very well have decided to start that adjacent facial recognition company in response. After all, regardless of an inaccurately valued asset, OkCupid is not passing the data on to a different company for good. The dating company is not losing anything nor getting any compensation for it. OkCupid just keeps on going like normal while the new face-recognition company springs up.

This is AI. This "limited" facial recognition approach doesn't require ownership of the data, they just needed to "borrow" it for a while.