> 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.

"big machine farm" reminds me of folding@home, which needed the same and got it.

"manual curation" is what Wikipedia did, as well as the free software community.

"technical expertise" is present in the free software world too. It is sparse since it is sparse in the world as a whole, but it exists.

"no Linus Torvalds figure" might be the main problem ATM.