It's not just processing power that smaller open projects lack in comparison to large corporations, but data.
AI thrives and depends on large amounts of clean, well labeled data.
Large corporations understand this and have hoarded data for a long time now. Some of them have also managed to label this data by millions of people through things like Recaptcha, or just by hiring lots of people to do it.
Open datasets tend to be much smaller and dirtier than small, open projects have access to.
I suppose it would be possible to, over time, collect lots of data and crowd-source some project to clean it up and label it well enough to be useful, then crowd-source the AI model training itself, but it would probably take a long time and by then corporate-owned AI models will already dominate (as they do now with MidJourney, for example, being way better in my experience than Stable Diffusion, but with time the difference will only get starker).
I'd also be concerned with such ostensibly open projects eventually going closed and commercial as IMDB did after getting lots of work by volunteers freely giving their time to writing reviews.
AI thrives and depends on large amounts of clean, well labeled data.
Large corporations understand this and have hoarded data for a long time now. Some of them have also managed to label this data by millions of people through things like Recaptcha, or just by hiring lots of people to do it.
Open datasets tend to be much smaller and dirtier than small, open projects have access to.
I suppose it would be possible to, over time, collect lots of data and crowd-source some project to clean it up and label it well enough to be useful, then crowd-source the AI model training itself, but it would probably take a long time and by then corporate-owned AI models will already dominate (as they do now with MidJourney, for example, being way better in my experience than Stable Diffusion, but with time the difference will only get starker).
I'd also be concerned with such ostensibly open projects eventually going closed and commercial as IMDB did after getting lots of work by volunteers freely giving their time to writing reviews.