> Until there's some sort of "community owned hardware"

The hardware is already available for renting at reasonable prices. We need community funding. I wish people pooled a fraction of the money they burn on local GPU rigs on funding training/testing/etc.

A big problem is like in open source: it's way too atomized. Just one competitive ground-up community LLM would require tens of millions $. But who gets to pick?

IMHO the only chance is highly specialized and smaller LLMs instead. And this is still millions to train.

And remember LLMs are competitive for only a handful months.