It should be feasible to crowd fund training runs right?

A training run costs somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars. That’s a thousand millions.

How many crowdfunded projects do you know that have raised even one percent of that? Who’s going to be in charge of collecting that scale of money? Perhaps some sort of company formed for the benefit of humanity, which will promise to be a non-profit? Some sort of “Open” AI?

Oh, wait.

	▲	derektank 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It’s well within the capabilities of governments in developed countries. If Mistral did not already exist, I would definitely expect the French government to invest in a national LLM, if only because of how defensive they are of the French language.
	▲	iugtmkbdfil834 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		<< That’s a thousand millions. I can't say that you are lying and you are not exactly exaggerating either. It is true that a new SOTA model -- from literal scratch -- it would be expensive. But, and it is not a small but, is the starting point really zero?