Llama Fund: Crowdfund AI Models

71 mountainriver 38 8/25/2025, 8:40:39 PM llama.fund ↗

Comments (38)

CharlesW · 2h ago
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.

mountainriver · 1h ago
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.

vunderba · 1h ago
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.

mnky9800n · 29m ago
I figured the red sun was the red eye of HAL 9000.
CharlesW · 1h ago
> 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

TOMDM · 2h ago
My first thought was "Why the hell is Meta crowd funding their models?!"

Neat idea, but I'd change the name

parsimo2010 · 2h ago
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.
mountainriver · 1h ago
Good feedback thanks!
Havoc · 2h ago
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

mountainriver · 1h ago
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.

Havoc · 1h ago
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

brendanfinan · 2h ago
Gotta start somewhere
Havoc · 2h ago
For startups in general yes, for aggregating millions of user funds you need a better plan straight off the bat
muragekibicho · 2h ago
Exactly! The most important thing is to start.
reactordev · 30m ago
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.

mountainriver · 3h ago
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!

pama · 2h ago
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?
mountainriver · 1h ago
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.

CuriouslyC · 2h ago
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.
mountainriver · 1h ago
Exactly! Even if we could get to training 8b models that would be amazing
echelon · 2h ago
Don't use the name "Llama". Llama is not open source.
nick_urban · 15m ago
The tone of these comments is unnecessarily negative.

Nice job taking a go at something you feel is important.

jfhucka · 2h ago
I think the name is based on the popular subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/
furyofantares · 15m ago
Here's a funny name for crowdfunding AI models: llemma proposition
quadrature · 2h ago
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.

mountainriver · 1h ago
Thats what this is! Researchers propose their work, and the community can fund it. Similar to other crowd funding platforms
Dilettante_ · 1h ago
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.)

bix6 · 1h ago
Cool idea but why will people put money into something you release as open source? Generally crowdfunding provides some sort of equity or reward?
jsheard · 2h ago
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.
Retr0id · 2h ago
And trademarks aside, the word is strongly associated with Meta in this space.
byyoung3 · 2h ago
^^^^^^^
mountainriver · 1h ago
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.
42lux · 2h ago
Why the hell would you use that name?
cendyne · 48m ago
Agreed. This is too meta-aligned to not end up in some legal spat later on when money goes through it.
zarazas · 2h ago
But it seems there is interest for this regardless
tiahura · 1h ago
Good idea. Doesn’t japan consider training fair use? Maybe take a look at incorporating there.
whalesalad · 1h ago
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.
htrp · 1h ago
too many llamas