Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days, with big tech companies and startups investing heavily in the space. This has led to the development of new GPT models, integrations with various systems, and new forms of "art". Although there are open-weight models like Meta"s Llama already available, you can now crowdfund AI models through a new platform, too.
Llama Fund is a platform that aims to democratize the training of AI models through crowdfunding. The idea is that AI models should be built in an open and collaborative manner rather than being developed in private silos by big tech companies. This would theoretically allow everyone to enjoy the benefits of AI by also sharing the costs.
In terms of operations, researchers would be responsible for presenting a detailed proposal including datasets, objectives, and expected outcomes. The public would then review the proposal and choose to fund it based on their interest. Once goals have been accomplished, the model is trained on "distributed computing resources", and are then released as open-source projects to the public.
While the problem of funding and resource constraints in this space is definitely real, crowdfunding is arguably not the way to solve it. For starters, the business model is highly dependent on trust between multiple parties, and there is an inherent risk of rug pull strategies being involved. There"s no guarantee that someone who proposes a project will actually utilize the funds for that initiative, and there"s absolutely no guarantee that they will release the trained models as open-source projects either.
There are tons of other problems with the approach, too. As pointed out by numerous people on Hacker News forums where the topic is gaining traction, Llama Fund is not backed by any notable investor, just a solo person named Patrick Barker. There is also a healthy amount of skepticism regarding the name of the platform, too, since "Llama" is a term that is trademarked by Meta, so many would wrongly assume it to be related to Mark Zuckerberg"s company. Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to potential problems associated with an AI crowdfunding platform. However, if you"re still interested in the initiative, you can check it out here.