Yeah he could easily get Hinton (who hates nothing more than Sam Altman) to endorse a new proper open AI lab, similar to what was described in the OpenAI Charter.
Karpathy, Alec Radford, and a ton of their old students are practically free agents right now who could probably be convinced to join.
There's probably even a chance of someone like Wojciech Zaremba leaving OpenAI to join them.
EU would build them CERN style compute clusters to train healthcare, education, climate, etc models.
I'm sure there's plenty of people at HuggingFace, Eluther, old Stability AI group who'd also love to get involved.