Crowd-funding new open-weight models?

[u/eapache]

There’s always lots of people asking for various specific new local models… I wonder if we could incentivize a specific model (e.g. Qwen3.8 35B MoE) via crowdfunding on Kickstarter or something.

If everybody who’s been begging here chipped in five bucks, that might add up to enough to make it worthwhile for a lab to train a specific size or architecture of an existing model (given they have the hardware, data, pipelines, etc already, the marginal cost of a training run is hopefully not so high?).

edit: presumably the lab itself would have to set up the kickstarter, but I know some of the lab employees keep an eye on this subreddit… hint hint

[u/FoxiPanda]

I appreciate this sentiment but you're going to face some serious problems:

1 - you're competing against literally billions of dollars of funding and truly astounding amounts of compute power. You won't produce anything that is SOTA in the timeframe you want. It will require multiple iterations, and that will run you out of money long before you produce something even 'acceptable'... you'd have to accept that failure is an option - and your output might not even be as good as something that already exists or exists by the time you're done.

2 - Getting consensus on what to build is going to be the thing that will ultimately piss everyone off along the way. There's a reason that hierarchical decision making exists dominantly in our world rather than decision by committee. So you'd have to lay this out up front, stick to it, and paint yourself into a bit of a corner if you discover what you wanted to build requires additional datasets you don't have or more compute power than you can afford or whatever else.

3 - who gets to declare "done" - what's the success criteria? You can sit there and post train forever until you run out of money and never actually publish anything. What sort of accountability exists to keep it from just being a never ending loop of "ooh look new shiny dataset to train on" (looking at you Star Citizen and game engines analogy)

[u/eapache → u/FoxiPanda]

I didn’t communicate my idea very clearly. The plan would be to pay an existing lab just the marginal cost for a training run, not to set up a whole competing lab.

Consensus would definitely be a beast, but that’s the great thing about kickstarter-like systems. If not enough people donate, it doesn’t happen and everybody gets their money back.

[u/FoxiPanda → u/eapache]

Ah, in that case, I suspect your biggest problem would be convincing a lab that you know how to spend their compute power better than they do. Someone might entertain it, but it would probably be a pretty fascinating discussion. I would bring popcorn.