There are a handful of "open source LLM" initiatives out there, although I don't think any of them are quite up to the level of ChatGPT. Possibly one of the more interesting ones is GLM-130B.

https://github.com/THUDM/GLM-130B

Released by some folks at Tsinghua University in China, back in August. The model itself is licensed under some janky "free to use, but not open source" license, but it looks like most of the code for training, evaluation, etc. is available and licensed under either the Apache License or a BSD-like license.

You might also find this of interest:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.08894 - "Distributed Deep Learning Using Volunteer Computing-Like Paradigm"

FWIW, I tend to agree with your overall sentiment. As AI becomes progressively more capable, it represents an ever increasing possibility of consolidating more and more power into the hands of fewer and fewer entities. I believe that one way to counter that (albeit not one without its own risks) is to democratize access to AI as much as possible.

Actually, now that I think about it, wasn't something along those lines purportedly the original idea behind OpenAI in the first place? Or am I having a "Mandela Moment" and mis-remembering?