The problem is the massive amount of money, data, and talent to produce anything remotely competitive. Ideas have been floated about distributed training, but training requires insanely fast interconnect between nodes making it impossible with the current methodologies we have. Now if you mean funded at a national level, that seems more doable so long as the training runs are centralized in big DCs.

There's always going to be some nerds out there that want to make and release a model as open, and share their knowledge along the way. I'm not too concerned.

The fear you're sharing has been shared since day 1 of open-weight models and it has yet to come to fruition.

Further, regardless of what any of these labs license their model as, the end user who has downloaded the weights can still use them for virtually any purpose (synthetic data, classification, etc) as much as they want and there is no way to reasonably enforce a license on those outputs.

So even if you can't run a service using this model's weights (without a license), the weights still do provide utility for training new models with any other license.

*Edit, responding to the replies: Constraints give rise to ingenuity. Who knows how we'll be training models in the future. Hopefully in a distributed fashion, maybe with some kind of consensus-driven training dataset selection. Crowd funding, etc. There's too many people that want this, and the knowledge on how to do it is out there (many times by now)

We already have all the open weight models though. They can't retroactively close them.

We already had that world, the axis of evil stopped releasing open source models years ago. It’s only because of the Chinese that we kept getting them.

A completely different direction is to remove the fair use allowance for training on copyrighted information (unless you e.g. open source your weights).

With distillation being so effective I do wonder whether we can just crowd source open alternatives.

If it is capital intensive and we require the work be done in the public benefit, the only options are international consortia or nationalization. Non-profits will be guided by the interests of the rich and are unaccountable to the public. Worker cooperatives are unlikely to be well capitalized (because what rich person would want to invest and not have control) and will still have private profit incentives.

Peer production processes (like open source) require that the inputs be specialized knowledge and relatively small amounts of capital.