The thing that really strikes me is that open source ML is starting to behave like open source software. I was able to take a pretrained text-to-image model and combine it with a pretrained video frame interpolation model and the two actually fit together! I didn't have to re-train or fine tune or map between incompatible embedding spaces, because these models can generalize to basically any image. I could treat these models as modular building blocks.
It just makes your creative mind spin. What if you generate some speech with https://replicate.com/afiaka87/tortoise-tts, generate an image of an alien with Stable Diffusion, and then feed those two into https://replicate.com/wyhsirius/lia. Talking alien! Machine learning is starting to become really fun, even if you don't know anything about partial derivatives.