[tikkun]

My guess is that they'll prefer to get nominations.

Having once done a grant application process - I think their approach is smart.

If they opened grant applications, they'd get thousands of (sadly mostly very low quality) applications. It's extremely hard to vet.

It's a much safer bet to wait until projects are already popular in the community, already being relied on by people, and where those devs would love to spend more time on their open source projects but they're limited by money.

Yes, the downside of this is that some people could make things happen if they were given money first. But, if I was them, I'd still prefer to do what they're doing and pick projects that are already successful and give grants to those.

(This isn't a comment about your project specifically, for all I know your project might be a popular open source LLM project that lots of people already rely on, in which case they probably already know about your project and will probably reach out to you for the second round, is my guess)