What exactly is wrong about it? I spent a fair amount of time on it and just saying "its bad" isn't really helpful feedback.
- the black text on fog gray background gradient is... not great looking.
- What's with the seemingly arbitrary floating red sun?
- the name Llama.fund is a bit odd given this is for general LLM models.
Thematically it just feels all over the place.
The website can be changed y'know.
- responsivity, the site does not scale well on portrait screens, specifically the email input is shifted to the left and partially off-screen
- layout, the header is not vertically aligned. The elements are off-center
- design, it looks nice at a first glance but lacks polish. Consider starting with an existing landing page template (there are lots of free ones) and refining with AI, if you are unable to create one yourself or hire/ask someone.
- contact/ TOS, you provide your (presumably) legal name and email address. If this is a real fund you should at least provide some sort of address and name of the fiscal host. A personal gmail address also strongly indicates that this is not a functional fund with proper organization of fiscal resources.
- name, already mentioned by other posters but the llama part is not good. My first thought was "Meta has new fund?" however the site's content directly squashed this (no legal contact -> no proper fiscal host). Even disregarding trademark concerns, you don't focus on llama but on open-source models, so please try to name it appropriately.
I would also say this is early stages and I don’t think it’s necessary to have every piece of this solved.
This isn’t a fund really it’s crowd funding, and we are looking to gauge interest as we reach out to investors and early clients.
I’m generally surprised by how many people on HN don’t follow their advice. Ship early, get validation
Man, I understand the implementation might have some rough edges but that's besides the point because the idea is cool, not sure why people are almost picking up on this guy.
Maybe I am wrong, I usually am, but I have been on hackernews for almost an year and HN is usually not like this. Most comments here feel like bully comments, literally being too harsh is not necessary and just reflects our personality back imo.
those are my 2 cents atleast.
He "ships" a website with a gmail address and nothing substantial. I could do the same, likely better, in 20 minutes. How could I even tell this from a scam, there is nothing of substance. And the great idea is just obvious and all the painful details to make it work are completely ignored
Like, What do you expect him to add, create a distributed training system, well that is orders of magnitude inefficient than normal training where people donate their money
If you want him to get some reputation, that's fair but I have always believed in building in the public kind approach. Maybe I am wrong, but yes the website definitely might be made better and honestly I might create some checkpoints from this website like never ever use some other persons trademarks,
make the website pleasant to see
just use some mail service, its not worth it showing the gmail sign. The people mocking this is wild
These are things that are easy to do imo.
As I said in the other project, transparency feels like the key to such problem. And honestly the fact that you could ship it in 20 minutes might be valid but I mean :/ cmon man.
What are your thoughts? I also thought of such idea and wanted to build something like this but gave up, Might build it in a year or two but what would you suggest him to do? Instead of giving him harsh responses, lets be productive since I don't care who implements my idea. I just want a place where people crowdfund models. I don't care if some patrick person builds it or I build or you build it. It should be good though
It's fine to develop "in the open" but this is a pitch for several million dollars, and handing that out without any credentials or track record is just not happening.
At least provide rough estimates for what is needed to get this done. What architecture? What training data? Where does the training happen? Who manages and administrates the cluster? Volunteers who try this the first time or paid experts? What solutions to failure recovery, to storage, to tracking and monitoring? Who has the last word on fundamental decisions? How will the legal component be handled? Do they already have a good law firm, how much would that cost? Will the first training be successful right away or how many iterations will be required? Can you even get access to the required GPUs at a reasonable price point? Train on older architecture? How much effort is required and planned to save cost by making training more efficient, ........
And well it turns out that the author hasn't used AI.
And the next comment I see is yours which "suggest" him to use "AI" for "refining"
This felt so weird on why are you suggesting him AI when the gp accused him of using AI in the first place as an almost deregotary term when he in fact didn't use it, like huh???
Note: the website has been updated since my original comment, notably the points on layout/design have been mostly fixed. The lovable tag has stayed through both iterations.
Man wants to crowdfund AI models to create open source AI models
He should've instead shared the prompt that he entered into lovable instead.
Makes a shit ton of sense now. Okayyyy wtf man, I won't really ever have the guts to push cheap AI slop like lovable directly to HN. I am okay with claude code / gemini / heck chatgpt or deepseek etc. but lovable etc. just makes it feel as if the person writing it doesn't even know how to read code or be comfortable with code itself, let alone writing the code.
That's a red flag for me if true.
> …just saying "its bad" isn't really helpful feedback.
Not sure if serious, but you can start with these:
• Trademark misuse – Legal exposure, identity confusion, invites takedown
• Gmail contact address – Unprofessional, lacks credibility, signals amateur status
• Anonymous "we" – No trust, no track record, only named person using alt email
• Lovable-generated site – Bad looking, substance-free, designed to farm email addresses
Would me having domain email routing somehow make it more legit? No it wouldn’t, I’ve now gotten validation that people like the idea without doing any of that, which is the exact advice that y combinator gives, yet is never followed in HN comments