Problem is that AI benefits from economy of scale and there's an exponential increase in performance with bigger models.

What this means is that it's a "winner-takes-all" situation and you can't compete as a smaller entity without huge capital injection to generate the compute necessary to train large models.

The only alternative I can think of is a distributed computer like Seti@home where people volunteer their GPUs to collectively train large open source AI models.

As cryptocurrency mining has shown us, most people won't do that on volunteer basis so there'd need to be some sort of financial incentive but I wouldn't want to mix a neutral AI open source model with perverse financial incentives like crypto.

So essentially that is not going to happen and even StabilityAI is eventually going to have to incorporate like OpenAI to continue on their path, sadly enough.