There is a ton you can do to help SOTA AI remain open.

Join the community building the tools - Help with UI/UX, documentation, keeping up with the latest, and evangelizing whatever method the team building it has devised to keep it sustained.

Being part of the community itself is more valuable than you realize.

Where are you finding this community?

Off the top of my head

- try to implement techniques that are doable on home hardware like the one described in OP (requires some $$$ investment) and give feedback or contribute to documentation / guides

- learn about different techniques and do educational writeups or documentation (like https://vickiboykis.com/2024/02/28/gguf-the-long-way-around/)

- build a tool / library that wrap academic techinques and expose them more easily to end users (like A1111 or comfyUI for stable diffusion)

Anything that can translate the high end research down to something a moderately technical user can use or learn from is a gigantic win

I am random software engineer, but from what I learned high-quality open source data sets seems to be enabler. There is shortage of golden datasets for training and evaluation in every popular and niche area you can imagine.