I get it, I understand why people like decentralization - but the open source community doesn't even have close to the capability to train an actually open-source LLaMA equivalent.
While those organizations might not be the right fit, I think they serve as an "existence proof" that a large scale effort like this is not completely inconceivable.
Could possibly see an industry consortium (of players too small to stand on their own) funding an open effort.
Probably not as much as in a zero-sum game where everyone is trying to train their own model. Every leap in CPU inference makes this an increasingly less appealing option for them.
But I agree, some industry consortium might try to do it. I think they would first have to be relying heavily on LLMs before they were willing to do that, and its possible by then that the lead will have gotten too large to easily surmount, especially now that everyone has stopped publishing.
They will be able to shutdown your startup on a whim. Even if they didn't politicians and regulators would be a huge risk. Without democratization we get blade runner . Not that democratization has no problems, just that it is the way a lot of us are wanting it to go.