Yes, this maximal decentralized usage where everybody has their own copy but can collaborate and pick and choose from other copies was a central idea in the creation of git. Ultimately it was made for Linux Kernel development and that is how that works over there.
You do not even need to use git specific protocols. One can simply import patch sets and mail them to each other.
Your reply begs the question which definition of AI you are using.
The above is from Russells and Norvigs "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" 3rd edition.
I would argue that from these 8 definitions 6 apply to modern deep learning stuff. Only the category titled "Thinking Humanly" would agree with you but I personally think that these seem to be self defeating, i.e. defining AI in a way that is so dependent on humans that a machine never could have AI, which would make the word meaningless.
The fundamental idea to use matrix multiplication plus a non linear function, the idea of deep learning i.e. back propagating derivatives and the idea of gradient descent in general, may not have changed but the actual algorithms sure have.
For example, the transformer architecture (that is utilized by most modern models) based on multi headed self attention, optimizers like adamw, the whole idea of diffusion for image generation are I would say quite disruptive.
Another point is that generative ai was always belittled in the research community, until like 2015 (subjective feeling would need meta study to confirm). The focus was mostly on classification something not much talked about today in comparison.
That was such a culture shock when I went to the us for the first time.
In Germany and many places in Europe do not think of burgers as sandwiches. I was so confused when I ordered a sandwich and got something like a burger.
I expected something like this. My confusion must've been quite the sight, the waitress even seemed concerned. Tasted great though.
That does make sense. My European brain did not let me think about guns as something one can forget about owning at first.
Kind of like forgetting how many cars one owns.