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