Mozilla or Wikimedia foundation have budgets with the right number of zeroes to support an effort like this.
While those organizations might not be the right fit, I think they serve as an "existence proof" that a large scale open / nonprofit project is not completely inconceivable.
Could possibly see an industry consortium (of players too small to compete on their own) funding an open effort.
Last idea sounds crazy but hear me out: how much would Nvidia spending $100M on "open"
models boost spending on graphics cards? I hope someone's running the numbers on that...
> how much would Nvidia spending $100M on "open" models boost spending on graphics cards?
Probably not as much as in a zero-sum game where everyone is trying to train their own model. Every leap in CPU inference makes this an increasingly less appealing option for them.
But I agree, some industry consortium might try to do it. I think they would first have to be relying heavily on LLMs before they were willing to do that, and its possible by then that the lead will have gotten too large to easily surmount, especially now that everyone has stopped publishing.
While those organizations might not be the right fit, I think they serve as an "existence proof" that a large scale open / nonprofit project is not completely inconceivable.
Could possibly see an industry consortium (of players too small to compete on their own) funding an open effort.
Last idea sounds crazy but hear me out: how much would Nvidia spending $100M on "open" models boost spending on graphics cards? I hope someone's running the numbers on that...