Is there ever going to be a way to distribute training - I would think this is the only way open models will eventually be able to exist and not just be owned by Microsoft, Google, Facebook and AWS.
The BigScience team (a working group of researchers that trained the BLOOM-176B LLM last year) released Petals [0][1] which allows distributed inference and fine-tuning of BLOOM, with the option to pick a custom model + private swarm. SWARM [2][3] is a WIP from yandex and UW that shares some of the same codebase, but is for distributed training.
[0] https://petals.ml/ [1] https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals [2] https://github.com/yandex-research/swarm [3] https://twitter.com/m_ryabinin/status/1625175933492641814