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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
What are you shipping here?
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.
I’ve gotten very positive feedback from designers on this look, but I guess to each their own
I figured the red sun was the red eye of HAL 9000.
> 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
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
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.
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)
My first thought was "Why the hell is Meta crowd funding their models?!"
Neat idea, but I'd change the name
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.
Good feedback thanks!
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
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.
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
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.
Gotta start somewhere
For startups in general yes, for aggregating millions of user funds you need a better plan straight off the bat
This is crowdfunding, it’s not that crazy at all. It’s early stages
Exactly! The most important thing is to start.
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!
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?
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.
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.
Exactly! Even if we could get to training 8b models that would be amazing
Don't use the name "Llama". Llama is not open source.
What happened to Open Model Initiative?
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.
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.
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.
I think the name is based on the popular subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/
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.
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
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.
Thats what this is! Researchers propose their work, and the community can fund it. Similar to other crowd funding platforms
Why the hell would you use that name?
Agreed. This is too meta-aligned to not end up in some legal spat later on when money goes through it.
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.
And trademarks aside, the word is strongly associated with Meta in this space.
^^^^^^^
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.
Cool idea but why will people put money into something you release as open source? Generally crowdfunding provides some sort of equity or reward?
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
Could probably tokenize it pretty easily and pay dividends from the commercial license sales or something.
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.)
You only need a couple million to train a decent 8b model. Doing that at scale would be amazing for the ecosystem
Good idea. Doesn’t japan consider training fair use? Maybe take a look at incorporating there.
Good idea!
But it seems there is interest for this regardless
Here's a funny name for crowdfunding AI models: llemma proposition
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.
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
that would be cool too!!
too many llamas
The tone of these comments is unnecessarily negative.
Nice job taking a go at something you feel is important.
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