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 effort like this is not completely inconceivable.
Could possibly see an industry consortium (of players too small to stand on their own) funding an open effort.
Re:The Coming of Local LLMs
by whimsicalism on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @01:46PM
(#35528536)
> 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.
I get it, I understand why people like decentralization - but the open source community doesn't even have close to the capability to train an actually open-source LLaMA equivalent.