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   Nathan Schneider (ntnsndr@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 15-Jun-2026 05:29:15 JST Nathan Schneider

   Students and academics especially, I'd love your feedback on this proposal: "an inference cooperative for academic AI" https://nathanschneider.info/2026/06/an-inference-cooperative-for-academic-ai/

   • Embed this notice
     Nathan Schneider (ntnsndr@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 15-Jun-2026 14:21:51 JST Nathan Schneider

     in reply to

     • Bo Waggoner

     @bwag thanks for your interest! Happy to chat more.

     I would think of the co-op as basically just a particular legal container for yet another edtech provider, though in the end one designed to be more accountable to university needs. And since LLM access is basically a commodity, I think it is a relatively easy cross-campus collaboration.

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     Bo Waggoner (bwag@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 15-Jun-2026 14:21:52 JST Bo Waggoner

     in reply to

     @ntnsndr
     Sounds fantastic. I'd love to chat about this! I wonder if there are historical precedents from other times when compute was very expensive and time-shared (1970s and earlier)?

     Organizationally, the co-op structure sounds challenging to me in modern academia. As a collaboration between a bunch of different departments, it sounds great. But as a collaboration between different university administrations/bureaucracies, managed from the top of each university, it's hard to visualize. It's simpler to picture a nonprofit that sells the service to universities...

     It sounds like it needs a lot of new software (which can then be open sourced, great). Doubt that vLLM + Open WebUI can cut it alone. The problem that stands out to me is load-balancing and fairness across organizations. (Maybe mitigate that by joining universities with different academic calendars and in very different time zones, so that peak usages don't coincide...) Individuals probably need usage limits that make sense, so there's within-university governance too.

   • Embed this notice
     Dan Connolly (dckc@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 15-Jun-2026 21:06:50 JST Dan Connolly

     in reply to

     @ntnsndr re open models... I hope you can stay ahead of regulatory capture: https://www.warman.life/blog/2026-04-27-the-moat-or-the-commons/

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     Nathan Schneider (ntnsndr@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 16-Jun-2026 06:12:22 JST Nathan Schneider

     in reply to

     • Dan Connolly

     @dckc You're right, that's definitely a risk. The whole model could be rendered illegal by a deft move from the dominant "labs."

   • Embed this notice
     Dan Connolly (dckc@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 16-Jun-2026 06:29:18 JST Dan Connolly

     in reply to

     @ntnsndr model :)

     I see what you did there