The article is about Kyutai, a French AI lab with an objective to compete with chatgpt and others with full open source (research papers, models, and training data).
They are aiming to also include the capability to use sound, image, etc… (according to this article (French) https://www.clubic.com/actualite-509350-intelligence-artificielle-xavier-niel-free-et-l-ancien-pdg-de-google-lancent-kyutai-un-concurrent-europeen-a-openai.html )
The post article also talks about some French context.
There is a project (AI Horde) that allows you to donate compute for inference. I’m not sure why the same doesn’t exist for training. I think the RAM/VRAM requirements just can’t be lowered/split.
Another way to contribute is by helping with training data. LAION, which created the dataset behind Stable Diffusion, is a volunteer effort. Stable Diffusion itself was developed at a tax-funded public university in Germany. However, the cost of the processing for training, etc. was covered by a single rich guy.