Well crap. Sorry too hear. I hope it does go away in time. Long COVID is no joke.

Interesting point… In this case, I have a hunch that the requirements in terms of training data and hardware to run the training on would remain prohibitive, but I do wonder how much could be actually achieved using a distributed scheme of sorts.

I’d take a model whose training data is open source and legitimately obtained. The only ones I know about are Apertus and OLMo, and they aren’t really competitive.