[nblintao]

The "price of an entire new employee" framing is spot on. I kept running into the same thing: individual experiments are cheap, but they add up fast, and nobody wants to approve that budget for speculative ideas.

I've been thinking of this as a gap between VC/Kickstarter and just doing it yourself. Most early ML experiments are too small for formal funding but too expensive to casually self-fund. So I built ML Patron where anyone can chip in a few bucks to sponsor an experiment they're curious about. I honestly don't have a good answer yet for how this turns into returns for sponsors in a traditional business sense. For now it's just open research patronage, like "I'd pay to know the answer to this". Platform runs it on cloud GPUs with public MLflow tracking.

Still very early: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47563959.