GGML – AI at the Edge

> Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross provided the pre-seed funding.

Why? Why should VCs get involved again?

They are just going to look for an exit and end up getting acquired by Apple Inc.

Not again.

It's possible to do whatever you want without VCs. The code is open source so you can start where he's starting from and run a purely different enterprise if you desire.

Do you have pre-seed funding to give him?

Daniel Gross is a good guy, a yes his company did get acquired by apple a while back, but he loves to foster really dope stuff by amazing people, and ggml certainly fits the bill. And this looks like an Angel investment, not a VC one if that makes any difference to you.

I do.

+1. VC involvement in projects like these always pivot the team away from the core competency of what you'd expect them to deliver - into some commercialization aspect that convert only a tiny fraction of the community yet take up 60%+ of the core developer team's time.

I don't know why project founders head this way...as the track records of leaders who do this end up disappointing the involved community at some point. Look to matt klein + cloud native computing foundation at envoy for a somewhat decent model of how to do this better.

We continue down the Open Core model yet it continues to fail communities.

Developers shouldn't be unpaid slaves to the community.

You're right. I just wish this decision was taken to the community, we could have all came together to help and supported during these difficult/transitional times. :( Maybe this decision was rushed or is money related, who knows the actual circumstances.

Here's the Matt K article https://mattklein123.dev/2021/09/14/5-years-envoy-oss/

Whenever a community project goes commercial, its interests are usually no longer aligned with the community. For example, llama.com makes frequent backwards-incompatible changes to its file format. I maintain a fork of ggml in the cosmopolitan monorepo which maintains support for old file formats. You can build and use it as follows:

    git clone https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
    cd cosmopolitan

    # cross-compile on x86-64-linux for x86-64 linux+windows+macos+freebsd+openbsd+netbsd
    make -j8 o//third_party/ggml/llama.com
    o//third_party/ggml/llama.com --help

    # cross-compile on x86-64-linux for aarch64-linux
    make -j8 m=aarch64 o/aarch64/third_party/ggml/llama.com
    # note: creates .elf file that runs on RasPi, etc.

    # compile loader shim to run on arm64 macos
    cc -o ape ape/ape-m1.c   # use xcode
    ./ape ./llama.com --help # use elf aarch64 binary above

It goes the same speed as upstream for CPU inference. This is useful if you can't/won't recreate your weights files, or want to download old GGML weights off HuggingFace, since llama.com has support for every generation of the ggjt file format.

"Good" is subjective, I guess.

Daniel Gross set up a company that seemed akin to indebted servitude, modern day slavery. They called it "Pioneer" and later changed the terms, I guess because of backlash.

They gave you a little bit of money to "do whatever you want" but owned a huge stake in anything you did in the future for a long period of time. They didn't advertise that part very heavily, they mostly portrayed it as "we're doing this because we're philanthropists" imo, rather than because they wanted to reinvent indentured servitude within the modern legal framework.

Why do I write these posts? Because I desperately want to believe we can get rich without doing dishonest, evil things. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's why all these guys behave this way. Maybe it really is never enough.

Genuinely curious, but why didn't you? Didn't the project gain enough visibility before you noticed this post, or was there any other reason which would be helpful for others to know.

I wonder, if Nat Friedman, who was the CEO of GitHub until recently, would work to tie this to the Microsoft/OpenAI LLM empire?

Or am I just being paranoid?

Had no idea he wanted to make it a company.

That makes sense - it looked very much like a pure open source project.

I wonder if they came to him or if someone else facilitated it as opposed to it being his initiative.

Ah, right, Lol, I didn't think of that at all. But could this be a wider problem than this? Many open source projects that could've been "sponsored" by someone like you, but ended up being commercialized by vested interests?