It seems like one needs a big machine farm and a vast corpus of training data with a lot of manual curation to get started creating a competitive LLM, plus whatever technical expertise that I don't even know about. The stuff that makes LLMs exist now and not earlier.

It might be possible to organize all that with volunteers and some paid work, but how in practice? Stallman seems kind of out of the game at this point and there is no Linus Torvalds figure neither for this, as of now.