Llama Fund: Crowdfund AI Models

by mountainriver • 11 months ago

99 75 11 months ago

Hey HN,

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.

Would love to hear thoughts from the community!

echelon• 11 months ago

Don't use the name "Llama". Llama is not open source.

CuriouslyC• 11 months ago

I think this is cool, it's not too hard to get a 500m model doing some sort of interesting stuff as a home researcher but scaling it into the low billions to see if it remains competitive out of my own pocket is a non starter.

mountainriver20• 11 months ago

Exactly! Even if we could get to training 8b models that would be amazing

pama• 11 months ago

Who is “we” (in the “We are launching”) and what is the mechanism you can convince people/investors that you or the proposer of the project know how to train large scale models and can make accurate practical estimates?

mountainriver20• 11 months ago

I have post-trained LLMs a lot, but ultimately it's not me proving it, it's the researchers who would pitch their work.

They can pitch it however it makes sense for their work, giving milestones similar to any other crowd funding platform.

doctorpangloss• 11 months ago

What happened to Open Model Initiative?

jsheard• 11 months ago

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.

Retr0id• 11 months ago

And trademarks aside, the word is strongly associated with Meta in this space.

byyoung3• 11 months ago

^^^^^^^

mountainriver20• 11 months ago

It was named that after r/LocalLlama, one of the biggest AI communities on reddit. Lots of people use "llama" now, I'm not super worried about it but may change it if it's confusing to people.

quadrature• 11 months ago

I really like the idea of crowd funding research or the opposite public funding of citizen science.

It would be interesting to also have a space where the community could propose research directions.

mountainriver20• 11 months ago

Thats what this is! Researchers propose their work, and the community can fund it. Similar to other crowd funding platforms

TOMDM• 11 months ago

My first thought was "Why the hell is Meta crowd funding their models?!"

Neat idea, but I'd change the name

parsimo20102• 11 months ago

Seconded. I don't know if I would want to be involved if Meta was organizing the effort, but I also don't want to be involved if they are using the name of a model (family of models) that they don't own to capitalize on the brand recognition.

mountainriver20• 11 months ago

Good feedback thanks!

Imustaskforhelp10• 11 months ago

But to be honest, not to defend the author since I also have this complaint but uh literally r/localllama, ollama.

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.

parsimo20102• 11 months ago

Both r/localllama and ollama started out as a way to run Llama open-weight specifically before they branched out to other models. So those names are okay, since Llama is in their heritage. This launch is specifically for models other than Llama, so it is not okay.

Havoc3• 11 months ago

Contact page lists a single gmail addr?

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

brendanfinan• 11 months ago

Gotta start somewhere

muragekibicho• 11 months ago

Exactly! The most important thing is to start.

Havoc3• 11 months ago

For startups in general yes, for aggregating millions of user funds you need a better plan straight off the bat

mountainriver20• 11 months ago

This is just focused on crowdfunding the money rather than a fully distributed training system which is less efficient. Although we may look into using the Prime Intellect work down the road.

It's not that challenging to spin up a crowdfunding platform, the laws and registrations are simple. It's capped at $5m per project, but if you go further into Reg A or Co-op models you can extend that much further. You can still train amazing models with $5m.

The whole point is I'm not a big company, I just worked on a startup doing heavy ML training and was often dismayed by the state of the OSS ecosystem. Whole cottage industries can form around open sourced models, and I want to help power that.

Havoc3• 11 months ago

Thanks for the sincere response to my comment that likely came across quite direct.

I do think for critical mass this will need a 3rd party custodian or platform of sorts though. DIY crowdfunding may not be hard to set up legally, but it's still facing the same rug pull risks as other crowdfundings.

To be clear my concern here is structural - not challenging your personal integrity. I'm sure your heart is in the right place

I want to help power that.

Same - I love the direction. Especially given risk of the big players running away with this and OSS gang being left with no competitive models. Think it would need a bit more guardrails before I drop in cash though

zarazas• 11 months ago

But it seems there is interest for this regardless

BoredPositron• 11 months ago

Why the hell would you use that name?

cendyne• 11 months ago

Agreed. This is too meta-aligned to not end up in some legal spat later on when money goes through it.

jfhucka2• 11 months ago

I think the name is based on the popular subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/

mkl• 11 months ago

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.

mountainriver20• 11 months ago

I think of Llama as a general term in the ecosystem. LlamaIndex, LocalLlama and more are all not meta related just speaking to open source models

CharlesW2• 11 months ago

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.

mountainriver20• 11 months ago

I am building the backend full time for this, I'm serious about it and see it as one of the biggest issues in the ecosystem today. I'm looking to gauge interest in the concept to hopefully raise more to implement it faster.

What exactly is wrong about it? I spent a fair amount of time on it and just saying "its bad" isn't really helpful feedback.

vunderba• 11 months ago

I'll take a stab at providing some specifics:

- the black text on fog gray background gradient is... not great looking.

- What's with the seemingly arbitrary floating red sun?

- the name Llama.fund is a bit odd given this is for general LLM models.

Thematically it just feels all over the place.

CharlesW2• 11 months ago

I spent a fair amount of time on it…

That's a red flag for me if true.

…just saying "its bad" isn't really helpful feedback.

Not sure if serious, but you can start with these:

• Trademark misuse – Legal exposure, identity confusion, invites takedown

• Gmail contact address – Unprofessional, lacks credibility, signals amateur status

• Anonymous "we" – No trust, no track record, only named person using alt email

• Lovable-generated site – Bad looking, substance-free, designed to farm email addresses

c0balt2• 11 months ago

To add to the other commenters, in the spirit of providing feedback for the next iteration:

- responsivity, the site does not scale well on portrait screens, specifically the email input is shifted to the left and partially off-screen

- layout, the header is not vertically aligned. The elements are off-center

- design, it looks nice at a first glance but lacks polish. Consider starting with an existing landing page template (there are lots of free ones) and refining with AI, if you are unable to create one yourself or hire/ask someone.

- contact/ TOS, you provide your (presumably) legal name and email address. If this is a real fund you should at least provide some sort of address and name of the fiscal host. A personal gmail address also strongly indicates that this is not a functional fund with proper organization of fiscal resources.

- name, already mentioned by other posters but the llama part is not good. My first thought was "Meta has new fund?" however the site's content directly squashed this (no legal contact -> no proper fiscal host). Even disregarding trademark concerns, you don't focus on llama but on open-source models, so please try to name it appropriately.

qingcharles• 11 months ago

As a web designer, your design is totally fine. Not gonna win any awards. It's fine, though.

bix62• 11 months ago

Cool idea but why will people put money into something you release as open source? Generally crowdfunding provides some sort of equity or reward?

mountainriver20• 11 months ago

Yeah that piece is still being worked out. An easy win here is you get a commercial license, but fractional ownership would be very cool

bix62• 11 months ago

Could probably tokenize it pretty easily and pay dividends from the commercial license sales or something.

htrp• 11 months ago

too many llamas

whalesalad• 11 months ago

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.

jfhucka2• 11 months ago

that would be cool too!!

mountainriver20• 11 months ago

Yeah we want to look at this as well using Prime Intellects work.

It’s not as efficient as raising capital though and collocating it

Imustaskforhelp10• 11 months ago

No offense but I feel like the way I am reading this, this is a one person project so saying "we" at this point is a little wrong but might make it more legitimate but still, good luck for the project.

Might create something similar in the future or maybe contribute it to you. Not competition, since the goal is to bring change I suppose.

Transparency really matters in such things I suppose.

What are your thoughts on supporting cryptocurrencies as donation method too? I feel like that there are cryptocurrencies like monero which are truly private and so that might help a little too making the donations more private imo

Grimblewald• 11 months ago

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.

tiahura• 11 months ago

Good idea. Doesn’t japan consider training fair use? Maybe take a look at incorporating there.

mountainriver20• 11 months ago

Good idea!

Dilettante_• 11 months ago

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.)

mountainriver20• 11 months ago

You only need a couple million to train a decent 8b model. Doing that at scale would be amazing for the ecosystem

reactordev2• 11 months ago

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.

Do that, and you’ll have something.

mountainriver20• 11 months ago

Agree, this is something we are working on. Having clear checkpoints with deliverables, which unlock more funding could help here

Existing crowdfunding platforms don’t do a whole lot of this and still work which is interesting.

reactordev2• 11 months ago

Make it look something like GitHub’s contribution grid. Curve balling but I like to see things in logical patterns. If there’s a way to display this information in a way that is easy to assess while also showing momentum is huge. Overall though I love the concept.

nick_urban• 11 months ago

The tone of these comments is unnecessarily negative.

Nice job taking a go at something you feel is important.

mountainriver20• 11 months ago

Thank you! I’m amazed at how many people are completely opposed to the tenants of YC (or any other accelerator) when this is a YC site

Imustaskforhelp10• 11 months ago

Ya man, I don't know what is happening to hackernews. I don't know what has changed but I was feeling the same thing

furyofantares• 11 months ago

Here's a funny name for crowdfunding AI models: llemma proposition

fp644• 11 months ago

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)

Llama Fund: Crowdfund AI Models

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