I'm sick and tired of the big labs controlling most of the generative AI landscape. We are launching Llama Fund as a means of democratizing large scale AI model training through crowd funding.
Our platform will allow researchers to propose a training pipeline, from data curation to the number of GPUs required. Ideally they will already have a toy model working. From there users can crowdfund the effort based on milestones. Researchers can offer incentives, such as providing commercial licenses to contributors.
We hope this will open up a whole new avenue for large scale model work, powering the open source future of AI.
You know Llama is a Meta trademark, right? If you want to compete with the big labs then step one should be to avoid handing them a loaded gun to shoot you down with.
Model runs take millions. Was really expecting this to have a credible major sponsor or alternatively propose a new distributed torrent-y training model to sidestep the massive pile of money issue
The subreddit is named after Meta's LLaMA family of LLMs, though now involves discussion of many other open weight models. This site is confusingly appropriating the name for the funding of other LLMs.
Patrick, it’s really hard to tell if you're serious or legitimate from this made-in-Lovable-in-5-minutes site.
If you are serious, I recommend that you ask the admins (hn@ycombinator.com) to delete this post, then spend at least half an hour thinking about a better name, and what readers might need to know before you (1) create a more substantive landing page and (2) re-announce. That would at least give you a chance at making a positive first impression.
Could there be a way to do this without $$$, but rather by providing compute? Similar to folding@home? A hundred thousand people can participate in training.
Look at petals.Collaborative inference and finetuning. Producing tokens nets you pseudo currency which can be used to que jump on generations. This can be bought and sold, resulting in a way to profit from your donation of compute should you want to.
Is this a viable target for crowdfunding? How much money can you really expect to get via this route vs how much is it gonna take to get something useful out of it?
(Genuine questions, seeing this made me realize I don't even have a ballpark idea.)
I’m just going to add my color to this since this seems to be devoid of any but the red sun.
I like the idea of crowdfunding models. Absolutely. Yes. However, I want to see how that translates to progress. I’m ok even if the model fails at a catastrophic level, but I want to see the progress towards that end for every dollar sourced.
The training logs, the assumptions, the cloud spend, the markers, and the fit to the end goal.
Training a model is not only expensive, but also technically challenging on a pure engineering level. Cluster management, storage, backups, access, fault recovery, and so forth. While crowdfunding training of a LLM is a nice idea, personally I would not invest in something this "uncooked". Why do you believe you are able to properly manage $5M+ and the infrastructure necessary?
I've met several people that believe if you just get the funding the rest is super easy, and it's slightly infuriating.
Apart from that, I agree with the other comments that the website looks unprofessional and llama is a bad name to use for this.
If I would want to give this a shot, I would first get engineers committed with a plan to start as soon as there's funding, set up a non-profit to handle the operation, and make sure that potential investors get the impression I knew what I was doing by providing a full plan and timeline, including addressing the legal challenges (among those, make it clear that the resulting model will be commercially usable and not sued to death. Are you planning on guaranteeing indemnification or do you want to release the model as-is? Etc)
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadI'm sick and tired of the big labs controlling most of the generative AI landscape. We are launching Llama Fund as a means of democratizing large scale AI model training through crowd funding.
Our platform will allow researchers to propose a training pipeline, from data curation to the number of GPUs required. Ideally they will already have a toy model working. From there users can crowdfund the effort based on milestones. Researchers can offer incentives, such as providing commercial licenses to contributors.
We hope this will open up a whole new avenue for large scale model work, powering the open source future of AI.
Would love to hear thoughts from the community!
It would be interesting to also have a space where the community could propose research directions.
Neat idea, but I'd change the name
There was a lot of llama hype in the starting tbh, and we all know how naming things is the hardest thing sometimes in software.
Model runs take millions. Was really expecting this to have a credible major sponsor or alternatively propose a new distributed torrent-y training model to sidestep the massive pile of money issue
If you are serious, I recommend that you ask the admins (hn@ycombinator.com) to delete this post, then spend at least half an hour thinking about a better name, and what readers might need to know before you (1) create a more substantive landing page and (2) re-announce. That would at least give you a chance at making a positive first impression.
It’s not as efficient as raising capital though and collocating it
(Genuine questions, seeing this made me realize I don't even have a ballpark idea.)
I like the idea of crowdfunding models. Absolutely. Yes. However, I want to see how that translates to progress. I’m ok even if the model fails at a catastrophic level, but I want to see the progress towards that end for every dollar sourced.
The training logs, the assumptions, the cloud spend, the markers, and the fit to the end goal.
Do that, and you’ll have something.
Existing crowdfunding platforms don’t do a whole lot of this and still work which is interesting.
Nice job taking a go at something you feel is important.
Apart from that, I agree with the other comments that the website looks unprofessional and llama is a bad name to use for this.
If I would want to give this a shot, I would first get engineers committed with a plan to start as soon as there's funding, set up a non-profit to handle the operation, and make sure that potential investors get the impression I knew what I was doing by providing a full plan and timeline, including addressing the legal challenges (among those, make it clear that the resulting model will be commercially usable and not sued to death. Are you planning on guaranteeing indemnification or do you want to release the model as-is? Etc)