Have they considered a community sponsored "group buy" of compute, to just train the model as far as the community will bear ?
SDXL was so great, surely 100k people could put 5$ a month toward making monthly improvement open source checkpoints happen ?
I don't see any other financing model work out if the output is open source. It simply can't be financed after publication. And it won't get the community support if it's behind a paywall.