| ▲ | Llama Fund: Crowdfund AI Models(llama.fund) |
| 98 points by mountainriver 3 days ago | 76 comments |
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| ▲ | CharlesW 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | mountainriver 3 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | mnky9800n 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I figured the red sun was the red eye of HAL 9000. | |
| ▲ | mountainriver 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’ve gotten very positive feedback from designers on this look, but I guess to each their own | |
| ▲ | Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The 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. |
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| ▲ | c0balt 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | mountainriver 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Thanks for the feedback! I would also say this is early stages and I don’t think it’s necessary to have every piece of this solved. This isn’t a fund really it’s crowd funding, and we are looking to gauge interest as we reach out to investors and early clients. I’m generally surprised by how many people on HN don’t follow their advice. Ship early, get validation | | |
| ▲ | fp64 2 days ago | parent [-] | | What are you shipping here? | | |
| ▲ | Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I think that uh they are shipping a platform through which crowdfunding can happen for AI models, which is an inherently cool idea imo. Man, I understand the implementation might have some rough edges but that's besides the point because the idea is cool, not sure why people are almost picking up on this guy. Maybe I am wrong, I usually am, but I have been on hackernews for almost an year and HN is usually not like this. Most comments here feel like bully comments, literally being too harsh is not necessary and just reflects our personality back imo. those are my 2 cents atleast. | | |
| ▲ | fp64 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I can only speak for myself and here it hits a nerve. Yes, the idea is fine, but the idea is only "crowdfund training", and not how this can be actually and practically implemented. It shows this exact ignorance of people who have no idea about anything but are sure that just with enough funding they can change the world, people just need to see how smart they are. I am not saying that this fully applies to OP, more that this is a regular occurance and can get people rather annoyed, at least it does for me, and thus lead to such harsh and blunt responses. He "ships" a website with a gmail address and nothing substantial. I could do the same, likely better, in 20 minutes. How could I even tell this from a scam, there is nothing of substance. And the great idea is just obvious and all the painful details to make it work are completely ignored | | |
| ▲ | Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago | parent [-] | | well a great point, I have no skin in the game and genuinely just want to discuss, but you don't really have to add anything substantial in such cases. Like, What do you expect him to add, create a distributed training system, well that is orders of magnitude inefficient than normal training where people donate their money If you want him to get some reputation, that's fair but I have always believed in building in the public kind approach. Maybe I am wrong, but yes the website definitely might be made better and honestly I might create some checkpoints from this website like never ever use some other persons trademarks, make the website pleasant to see just use some mail service, its not worth it showing the gmail sign. The people mocking this is wild These are things that are easy to do imo. As I said in the other project, transparency feels like the key to such problem.
And honestly the fact that you could ship it in 20 minutes might be valid but I mean :/ cmon man. What are your thoughts? I also thought of such idea and wanted to build something like this but gave up, Might build it in a year or two but what would you suggest him to do? Instead of giving him harsh responses, lets be productive since I don't care who implements my idea. I just want a place where people crowdfund models. I don't care if some patrick person builds it or I build or you build it. It should be good though | | |
| ▲ | fp64 2 days ago | parent [-] | | As I said in a different reply, I would not know how to address the engineering and management aspect, let alone the legal aspect, which are the biggest blockers and likely the reason this is not already done. It's fine to develop "in the open" but this is a pitch for several million dollars, and handing that out without any credentials or track record is just not happening. At least provide rough estimates for what is needed to get this done. What architecture? What training data? Where does the training happen? Who manages and administrates the cluster? Volunteers who try this the first time or paid experts? What solutions to failure recovery, to storage, to tracking and monitoring? Who has the last word on fundamental decisions? How will the legal component be handled? Do they already have a good law firm, how much would that cost? Will the first training be successful right away or how many iterations will be required? Can you even get access to the required GPUs at a reasonable price point? Train on older architecture? How much effort is required and planned to save cost by making training more efficient, ........ |
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| ▲ | Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Its so darn funny that the parent post says that they couldn't take this seriously because they think it was created by lovable (an AI vibe coded) thing And well it turns out that the author hasn't used AI. And the next comment I see is yours which "suggest" him to use "AI" for "refining" This felt so weird on why are you suggesting him AI when the gp accused him of using AI in the first place as an almost deregotary term when he in fact didn't use it, like huh??? | | |
| ▲ | c0balt a day ago | parent [-] | | I looked at the source code because I was interested in what template/backend was used and the header contains a `<meta name="twitter:site" content="@lovable_dev" />`. As far as I know this is an artifact from lovable.dev, a generative AI tool for website vibe coding, and this does link to lovables twitter account. Note: the website has been updated since my original comment, notably the points on layout/design have been mostly fixed. The lovable tag has stayed through both iterations. | | |
| ▲ | Imustaskforhelp a day ago | parent [-] | | very interesting find. That tarnishes a lot of reputation that it has. Man wants to crowdfund AI models to create open source AI models He should've instead shared the prompt that he entered into lovable instead. Makes a shit ton of sense now. Okayyyy wtf man, I won't really ever have the guts to push cheap AI slop like lovable directly to HN. I am okay with claude code / gemini / heck chatgpt or deepseek etc. but lovable etc. just makes it feel as if the person writing it doesn't even know how to read code or be comfortable with code itself, let alone writing the code. |
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| ▲ | qingcharles 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As a web designer, your design is totally fine. Not gonna win any awards. It's fine, though. | |
| ▲ | CharlesW 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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 | | |
| ▲ | mountainriver 2 days ago | parent [-] | | None of this is actually needed to get validation. Would me having domain email routing somehow make it more legit? No it wouldn’t, I’ve now gotten validation that people like the idea without doing any of that, which is the exact advice that y combinator gives, yet is never followed in HN comments | | |
| ▲ | mnky9800n 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I think your attitude to feedback from people who clearly have more experience than you is off putting and it would incline me to believe you lack the responsibility and grit to see a project like this through. |
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| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | TOMDM 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My first thought was "Why the hell is Meta crowd funding their models?!" Neat idea, but I'd change the name |
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| ▲ | parsimo2010 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | parsimo2010 2 days ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago | parent [-] | | good 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 |
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| ▲ | mountainriver 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Good feedback thanks! |
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| ▲ | Havoc 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | mountainriver 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | Havoc 3 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | mountainriver 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Sorry too! Rereading my comment it sounds a bit snarky. I agree that a backer would definitely help here, one of the reasons for posting this is to see if we can drum up more interest there. I agree in the guardrails as well, we are thinking checkpoints with clear deliverables to unlock more cash could help. It’s really interesting that the existing crowdfunding platforms don’t enforce a whole lot of this and still work. It seems off to me but I can’t argue much with the outcome, it could be that the smarter crowd that engages here would care more though. |
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| ▲ | brendanfinan 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Gotta start somewhere | | |
| ▲ | Havoc 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | For startups in general yes, for aggregating millions of user funds you need a better plan straight off the bat | | | |
| ▲ | muragekibicho 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Exactly! The most important thing is to start. |
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| ▲ | mountainriver 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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! |
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| ▲ | pama 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | mountainriver 3 days ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | CuriouslyC 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | | |
| ▲ | echelon 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Don't use the name "Llama". Llama is not open source. | |
| ▲ | doctorpangloss 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | What happened to Open Model Initiative? |
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| ▲ | reactordev 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | mountainriver 2 days ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | reactordev 2 days ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | jfhucka 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think the name is based on the popular subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ |
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| ▲ | mkl 3 days ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | mountainriver 2 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | tiahura 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Good idea. Doesn’t japan consider training fair use? Maybe take a look at incorporating there. |
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| ▲ | quadrature 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | mountainriver 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Thats what this is! Researchers propose their work, and the community can fund it. Similar to other crowd funding platforms |
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| ▲ | 42lux 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why the hell would you use that name? |
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| ▲ | cendyne 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Agreed. This is too meta-aligned to not end up in some legal spat later on when money goes through it. |
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| ▲ | jsheard 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | Retr0id 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | And trademarks aside, the word is strongly associated with Meta in this space. | | | |
| ▲ | mountainriver 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | bix6 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Cool idea but why will people put money into something you release as open source? Generally crowdfunding provides some sort of equity or reward? |
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| ▲ | mountainriver 2 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | bix6 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Could probably tokenize it pretty easily and pay dividends from the commercial license sales or something. | | |
| ▲ | Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Man 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 |
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| ▲ | fp64 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | Dilettante_ 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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.) |
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| ▲ | mountainriver 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You only need a couple million to train a decent 8b model. Doing that at scale would be amazing for the ecosystem |
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| ▲ | whalesalad 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | Grimblewald 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | mountainriver 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | jfhucka 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | that would be cool too!! |
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| ▲ | zarazas 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| But it seems there is interest for this regardless |
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| ▲ | furyofantares 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Here's a funny name for crowdfunding AI models: llemma proposition |
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| ▲ | htrp 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| too many llamas |
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| ▲ | nick_urban 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The tone of these comments is unnecessarily negative. Nice job taking a go at something you feel is important. |
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| ▲ | Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 | |
| ▲ | mountainriver 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 |
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