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Star Citizen raised half a billion dollars for a game that is never going to be released and all they did was promise a game in space with spaceships, sooo ...

Yeah, I think we could crowdfund a billion dollars for this, but we'd need some really competent people making sure it gets used optimally.

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I think the second part of what you said is key. Seeing this thread hit top of HN I can see there's a desire or need for something like this, but how you'd even go implementing it, I have no idea. I have mildly speculative ideas but nothing that would result in a successful outcome. So it's like OK, lets say you crowdsource even $20m, now what. What's the structure of this thing that has $20m, how do you use it, what do you build, how do you give access to other people? My gut says, co-op style entity, no shares, its membership based, people put in the money for that and infra costs. You don't try do anything fancy, buy compute for cheap, Hetzner, bare metal elsewhere, whatever, find the best open source project currently for GPT and start to run it, provide an API to it and then start to gauge feedback, do everything in the open, hold weekly meetings, be totally transparent about the costs. Ultimately sustainability is still hard because people are crowdfunding you, so is that forever? Is there a self sustainable model there? So many questions.

You'd need a good volunteer team of experts willing to shepherd it first and foremost. For it to be a volunteer team you'd need everyone to ideologically believe in the idea. They should be able to build an outline, line item wise, how each dollar is spent.

I think that will help get it started. Then swap to a non-profit monthly sub model where people are simply paying for use (pay out the cost for labor and hardware at that point only). A utility bill essentially.

I like the analogy of a utility bill, that makes sense.

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