It's a provocative idea, and I want to offer a provocative comment. Yes, we can! But there are many roadblocks. If we take ChatGPT, something like matrix multiplication is already a hurdle. Deepmind is working on a way to reduce the number of operations to multiply matrices, but I don't see that solving the issue. Then there are tricks like trying to distill a leaner neural network from a bigger one. But it is not that easy to implement.

Another option could be to have many little neural networks or other models that use different or the same data. The results could be then gathered in a distributed fashion through something akin to averaging. Or you could use the Bitcoin model, offering little assignments instead of mining. You could have a Wikipedia of data like Common Crawl.

But in the end one person and a laptop won't get far. You need thousands of hours to even understand the basics. You need a supercomputer. But never say never. Maybe there is a better way. After all humans don't need that much data to learn.