If there was an AI model that ran locally on a PC for basic things and cloud sourced computer power for more complex tasks, all of these data centers would become obsolete in an instant. All of the invested capital and materials wasted in a flash.
Edit: lots of great counter points in the comments.
This is all true, and doesn’t even consider the fact that you can’t just trust random crowdsourced computations to be correct! A bad actor could absolutely mess with inference and affect the outcome to their advantage.
You’d need to either do something with zero-knowledge proofs (insanely computationally intensive), or have multiple independent people do the same work and cross-check the results (also extremely computationally expensive).