If folding@home is a useful yardstick by which we might estimate the amount of GPU-ish capability that civilians might be coaxed into donating to a shared enterprise, yeah, it doesn't look pretty. This is extremely rough napkin math but comparing to xAI's Collosus 2 for example, for training workflows you're probably looking at 4-5 orders of magnitude the capability of all of folding@home combined. That's 100,000 times faster.
Very rough math like I said but I doubt it's directionally wrong.
And even if you did force literally everyone on earth with some sort of GPU to max it out 24/7 in service of an open source AI training enterprise - you would waste so much power trying to use that inefficient consumer hardware with the worst latency imaginable that it would be cheaper and faster to get everyone to instead chip in some cash to buy a datacenter with blackwell chips instead! So the idea has no legs whatsoever.
Plus a scientific project to benefit all of humanity doesn’t have quite the same ring as the thing thats stealing your job, from the volunteer’s perspective
folding@home reached 2.43 exaflops by April 12, 2020, which would make it the largest supercomputer on the planet.
it's down 99% since that peak. But let's compare to it anyway.
It's pretty useless to compare raw FLOPS, but as a general hand-waving guesstimate, F@H is currently doing about 25 petaflops in a mix of FP16 and 32. AI usually trains at FP8, but to keep things fair the H100 is quoted at 60 FP64 teraflops per unit, so that's 12 FP64 exaflops given its 200k count.
So F@H at its peak did 2.43 exaflops@FP16/32. Colossus 1 does 12@FP64. These numbers are very hand-wavy, but I think the point is made.
By the way, I'm not trying to crap on F@H - I think it's an outstanding project and I've run it in the past. But a volunteer group simply cannot compete with well-funded, concentrated effort like what's going into AI.