I’ve been following an interesting thread online where someone shared their journey of training a large language model from scratch - not at Google or OpenAI, but from their own setup, using just $500 in AWS credits. What struck me wasn’t just the technical achievement, but what it represents: we’re witnessing the democratization of AI development in real time.

The person behind this project trained a 960M parameter model using public domain data, releasing it under a Creative Commons license for anyone to use. They’re calling it the LibreModel Project, and while they admit the base model isn’t particularly useful yet (most 1B models “kind of suck” before post-training, as they put it), the fact that an individual can now do this at all feels significant.