some niche community uses where the budget is none and people will just distribute the electricity/GPU cost
Aren't there a lot of people who don't run their GPUs 24/7? That would put the marginal cost of equipment at zero, and electricity costs what, something around $1/W-yr?
Yes, for actually dividing models across machines, which was the original idea. I'd shifted to a different (and less technically interesting) question of sharing GPUs without dividing the model.
For dividing training, though, see this paper:
SWARM Parallelism: Training Large Models Can Be Surprisingly Communication-Efficient