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.