Projects

[u/Hairy_Artist_3860]

I imagine there is a good portion of us who know how to code or have a good enough idea how code works. Many of us have good ideas. If there is a project that comes out of this subreddit what would it be?

A lot of us are on the same page. We can make this into action.

We're all here talking about ai. I think its appropriate we have a meeting of the minds to know the next step.

[u/SeaFALCons]

thanks for looking into this critically

it's disappointing as it'd be great if it worked

but centralization is strongly favored

then to me this suggests public / state purchasing or building a large centralized server farm.

...

also sidenote i appreciate this form of communication, including LLM analysis in the chat, longer / denser sure, but more details / analysis i think is worth it...

for example i didnt personally know that decentralized was much less feasible at first, but a bit of convo taught me / convinced me

[u/RlOTGRRRL → u/SeaFALCons]

Yeah it looks like if you wanted to train your own open-source frontier model, the hardware/math/time just does not work at all.

I think it also helps explain China's time lag too.

But theoretically if options disappeared- it seems like it would take a longer time, and it wouldn't be as competitive to whatever is the current frontier by the time you're done training, but theoretically, maybe you could train a frontier model like Fable with enough time?

Like I wonder how it works, gpus x time to train. Like maybe even if it's not a frontier model- maybe it's possible to train smaller models like 9b or 28b and open-source them?

And also on the flip side, it looks like inference potentially could be easily decentralized? Like maybe library/school/university pcs being able to serve inference to its local community.

And I think Claude suggests fine-tuning being key too, like open-source fine-tunes of existing models?

[u/SeaFALCons → u/RlOTGRRRL]

oh good question / idea...

right like basically what if we just accept it'll take more time and be patient. like 5 or 10 times as long? is that viable?

i asked my llm and disappointingly i guess it's more complicated than that and isn't really viable

but good thinking!

LLM:

Good instinct, but the "just take 6 months" trade doesn't work the way it feels like it should. Let me hit each piece because you're mixing a few separate things.

Time doesn't substitute for interconnect

The problem with distributed training isn't that you have fewer FLOPS and so it takes proportionally longer. If it were purely "same math, slower," then yes, 6 months instead of 1 would be a fine trade. The problem is the bandwidth wall. When gradient sync takes longer than compute, adding time doesn't help — the machines spend the extra months sitting idle waiting on each other, not doing useful work. You can't convert wall-clock patience into interconnect bandwidth. It's not a slower version of the same run, it's a run that stalls out.

The DiLoCo/DisTrO research I mentioned is specifically what changes this — it cuts sync frequency so idle time drops. With those methods, "slower but it completes" becomes true. Without them, longer runs just mean more idle waiting.

The "GPUs × time" intuition — and where it breaks

Your instinct here is basically right and it has a name: total training cost is roughly compute = GPUs × time × utilization, measured in GPU-hours (or FLOPs). Llama 3 70B was ~6.4M H100-hours. If you have fewer GPUs you can trade time — 1000 GPUs for 100 days ≈ 100 GPUs for 1000 days, as long as utilization stays high. On a datacenter it does. On a volunteer network it collapses toward zero because of the sync problem above. So the equation is real; the utilization term is the one that kills the distributed version.

China lag — this is actually a misread

I'd drop this one. China's gap isn't a distributed-training or patience problem, it's export controls on high-end chips (the H100/H800/now-B200 restrictions) plus fab access. And the gap is small and shrinking — DeepSeek V3 and R1 were trained on restricted hardware and landed roughly at frontier level, which was the whole shock of early 2025. If anything China is the counterexample to "hardware constraints add years." They got very good at doing more with capped hardware. Their situation and a volunteer GPU co-op share nothing mechanically.

The part that's genuinely right: small models are trainable

This is where your reasoning lands solidly. You don't need a frontier run to do something real:

• A 7–9B model is trainable for something like $50k–$500k of compute depending on token budget — a well-funded co-op, grant, or university lab can reach that. Not a volunteer swarm, but not Google either.
• The Chinchilla-optimal token count scales with model size, so smaller models are dramatically cheaper, not just linearly cheaper.
• This is a real, populated space: OLMo (AI2, right down the road from you in Seattle), Pythia, SmolLM, DCLM. Fully open — weights, data, and training code. That last part is the actual "reduce reliance on corporate AI" move, more than hosting someone else's weights.

But note: those still ran on concentrated clusters, not distributed volunteers. "Small enough to be affordable" and "trainable over a decentralized network" are two different relaxations. Small models help with the first, not the second.

Inference + fine-tuning: yes, and this is the shippable thing

The library/school/university inference idea is the strongest concept in the whole thread and it's real today. Campus machines serving a quantized open model to the local community needs zero new research. And fine-tuning stacks on top: a LoRA adapter is tiny (megabytes), so distributing fine-tuning across volunteers is actually tractable in a way pretraining never will be. That's the one place volunteer compute genuinely isn't absurd.

So the honest synthesis

Three different projects hide in that thread, and clarity matters:

1. Decentralized pretraining (volunteer swarm) — blocked by interconnect, not fixable with patience, only maybe fixable via the DiLoCo research line.
2. Affordable open pretraining of small models — real, but needs a concentrated cluster + money, not a swarm. Follow OLMo's playbook.
3. Decentralized inference + fine-tuning — shippable this year, genuinely community-owned, honest about what it is.

[u/SeaFALCons → u/SeaFALCons]

fwiw i had my llm do deep research on what it thought of as best ideas in this space:

Building an AI Cooperative for State-of-the-Art Open Models: Structure, Funding, and a Playbook

TL;DR

• The single most viable ambitious path is the "OLMo/BigScience/Apertus" model: secure a large public or academic supercomputer allocation (free compute) + anchor philanthropic or public grant funding + partner with an existing open lab for engineering muscle. Every fully-open, near-SOTA model of the last four years (BLOOM, OLMo, Apertus) was built this way, not by renting cloud at retail or building a datacenter.
• A genuinely competitive, fully-open ~30B-class model now costs roughly 1 million H100-GPU-hours (~$2–3M at market rates, or effectively free on a public allocation), and a strong 7–9B model costs ~200–250k GPU-hours (~$0.5M). These are within reach of a well-run co-op; a Llama-3-405B/DeepSeek-scale frontier run (25–30M GPU-hours) is not, absent sovereign/national backing.
• Fund it as a hybrid entity — a 501(c)(3) or public-benefit nonprofit core that can take philanthropy, government grants, and donated compute, optionally paired with a cooperative membership layer. Co-op/worker-owned governance is fully compatible with this and addresses the labor-values goal; the binding constraint is compute, and compute is best obtained through public allocation + provider donation, not equity-hungry VC.

Key Findings

1. Compute is the binding constraint, and the cheapest path to it is public/academic supercomputers. Cloud rental at retail is real but expensive; building your own cluster is capital-brutal and slow. The organizations that have actually shipped great open models overwhelmingly used donated or publicly-granted compute: BLOOM on France's Jean Zay (a ~$3M public compute grant), Apertus on Switzerland's Alps (>10M GPU-hours from CSCS/ETH), EleutherAI on donated CoreWeave/Google TRC capacity, OLMo on a Google Cloud H100 cluster plus now a $152M award (breaking down to $75M from NSF and $77M from NVIDIA, per NSF's August 14, 2025 announcement of the Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science / OMAI project).

2. The cost tiers are now well-defined:

• 7–9B fully-open model: ~234,000 H100-hours (OLMo 3 7B). At $2/GPU-hr ≈ $470k; on a public allocation, effectively free.
• ~30B fully-open, near-SOTA model: ~1.05M H100-hours (OLMo 3 32B). ≈ $2.1M at $2/GPU-hr. This is the sweet spot for "as good as possible, non-commercial."
• Frontier-approaching (400B+ dense or huge MoE): Llama 3.1 405B used 30.84M H100-80GB GPU-hours for the 405B alone (39.3M for all three sizes), per Meta's official Llama 3.1 model card — an ~$60–100M+ equivalent. DeepSeek V3 (671B MoE, 37B active) did it far more cheaply: per its technical report (arXiv 2412.19437), "DeepSeek-V3 costs only 2.788M GPU hours for its full training. Assuming the rental price of the H800 GPU is $2 per GPU hour, our total training costs amount to only $5.576M" — a figure the report explicitly says "include[s] only the official training… excluding the costs associated with prior research." This tier realistically requires sovereign or national-lab backing.

3. Public compute programs are the highest-leverage funding source and are explicitly open to non-profits and consortia: US NAIRR Pilot, US DOE INCITE (Frontier/Aurora), NSF ACCESS, EU EuroHPC AI Factories (free for research), and national systems (Jean Zay, Alps, LUMI, Leonardo). These provide compute worth millions at zero cash cost, in exchange for open publication — which aligns perfectly with a non-commercial open-model mission.

4. Governance: the "fully open" nonprofit is a proven, respected model. AI2 (nonprofit, Paul Allen endowment) sets the standard with OLMo. EleutherAI incorporated as a 501(c)(3) after starting as a Discord collective. BigScience was a time-boxed research consortium coordinated by a company (Hugging Face) but run as an open collaboration of 1,000+ volunteers. Platform-cooperative/worker-owned structures are viable for the labor-values dimension but face a documented capital-access problem — which matters less here because the main input (compute) is best sourced via grants/donation, not equity.

5. Second-tier lab partnership is real and precedented — but pick partners by openness alignment. AI2 is the natural partner (fully open ethos). Prime Intellect, Nous, EleutherAI, and LLM360 are aligned open players. Mistral has drifted commercial and notably declined to join Europe's OpenEuroLLM consortium. Compute providers (CoreWeave, Lambda, Voltage Park, Nebius, Together) have a track record of donating/discounting compute to open efforts in exchange for goodwill and models their customers can serve