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Llama Fund: Crowdfund AI Models
- vincedaly88 1y ago[dead]
- mountainriver 1y agoHey 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 1y agoDon't use the name "Llama". Llama is not open source.
- CuriouslyC 1y agoI 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.
- mountainriver 1y agoExactly! Even if we could get to training 8b models that would be amazing
- pama 1y agoWho 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?
- mountainriver 1y agoI 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 1y agoWhat happened to Open Model Initiative?
- jsheard 1y agoYou 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 1y agoAnd trademarks aside, the word is strongly associated with Meta in this space.
- byyoung3 1y ago^^^^^^^
- mountainriver 1y agoIt 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 1y agoI 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.
- mountainriver 1y agoThats what this is! Researchers propose their work, and the community can fund it. Similar to other crowd funding platforms
- TOMDM 1y agoMy first thought was "Why the hell is Meta crowd funding their models?!" Neat idea, but I'd change the name
- parsimo2010 1y agoSeconded. 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.
- mountainriver 1y agoGood feedback thanks!
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoBut 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.
- parsimo2010 1y agoBoth 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.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agogood point, makes sense imo. but still iirc the author was inspired by r/localllama but yeah, it would make a lot more sense if they change their name given that it can be trademarks issue idk
- Havoc 1y agoContact 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 1y agoGotta start somewhere
- muragekibicho 1y agoExactly! The most important thing is to start.
- Havoc 1y agoFor startups in general yes, for aggregating millions of user funds you need a better plan straight off the bat
- mountainriver 1y agoThis is crowdfunding, it’s not that crazy at all. It’s early stages
- mountainriver 1y agoThis 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.
- 1y ago
- zarazas 1y agoBut it seems there is interest for this regardless
- BoredPositron 1y agoWhy the hell would you use that name?
- cendyne 1y agoAgreed. This is too meta-aligned to not end up in some legal spat later on when money goes through it.
- jfhucka 1y agoI think the name is based on the popular subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/
- mkl 1y agoThe 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.
- mountainriver 1y agoI 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
- CharlesW 1y agoPatrick, 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.
- mountainriver 1y agoI 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 1y agoI'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.
- mnky9800n 1y agoI figured the red sun was the red eye of HAL 9000.
- mountainriver 1y agoI’ve gotten very positive feedback from designers on this look, but I guess to each their own
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoThe only valid criticism I feel like is the llama.fund but I mean there is r/localllama which has been a reddit space for discussing open source models. There is ollama which runs open source models so uh :/ yeah The website can be changed y'know.
- bix6 1y agoCool idea but why will people put money into something you release as open source? Generally crowdfunding provides some sort of equity or reward?
- mountainriver 1y agoYeah that piece is still being worked out. An easy win here is you get a commercial license, but fractional ownership would be very cool
- bix6 1y agoCould probably tokenize it pretty easily and pay dividends from the commercial license sales or something.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoMan the crypto bros will eat this so hard, the way I see them interact. They are the peak AI bubble things, slap AI on crypto and boom your chain now has attention when the AI thing might be very shitty and doesn't have much to do with AI anyways but just say/mention AI
- htrp 1y agotoo many llamas
- whalesalad 1y agoCould 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.
- jfhucka 1y agothat would be cool too!!
- mountainriver 1y agoYeah we want to look at this as well using Prime Intellects work. It’s not as efficient as raising capital though and collocating it
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoNo 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 1y agoLook 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 1y agoGood idea. Doesn’t japan consider training fair use? Maybe take a look at incorporating there.
- mountainriver 1y agoGood idea!
- Dilettante_ 1y agoIs 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.)
- mountainriver 1y agoYou only need a couple million to train a decent 8b model. Doing that at scale would be amazing for the ecosystem
- reactordev 1y agoI’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.
- mountainriver 1y agoAgree, 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.
- reactordev 1y agoMake 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 1y agoThe tone of these comments is unnecessarily negative. Nice job taking a go at something you feel is important.
- mountainriver 1y agoThank 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
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoYa 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 1y agoHere's a funny name for crowdfunding AI models: llemma proposition
- fp64 1y agoTraining 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)