LeCun-backed AI Alliance launches Project Tapestry for federated open frontier models
ylecun · x · 2026-10-05
Yann LeCun, now Chief Science Advisor, announced Project Tapestry from the AI Alliance (a 200+ member open-source coalition): a platform for globally federated training of open frontier foundation models, letting institutions and nations co-train a shared model while keeping data local and building sovereign derivatives.
- The thesis: training frontier models is expensive, distilling them is cheap — that market force alone means frontier foundation models will become free/open.
- Milestone Zero is complete (Sept 1, 2026): two proofs of concept trained across India, Australia and two AWS regions, exchanging only model weights and no data (12B tokens), with all results — including failures — published.
- LeCun argues open weights alone don't make pretraining participatory; the infrastructure and design decisions remain concentrated in a handful of companies, and Tapestry aims to change that.
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