In modern world open code often doesn't mean much. E.g. Chrome is opensourced. And yet no one really contributes to it or has any say over the direction its going: https://twitter.com/RickByers/status/1715568535731155100
...accompanied by the wrath of countless others discouraging you from trying to fork if you even so much as give slight indications of wanting to do so, and then when you do, they continue to spread FUD about how your fork is inferior.
I've seen plenty of discussions here and elsewhere where the one who suggests forking got a virtual beating for it.
Machine learning is fun and ultimately it doesn't require a lot of code. If people have the compute, open source maintainers will have the interest to exploit it due to the high coolness-to-work-required ratio.