Yeah, I'm looking into government programs such as the EU "Prototype Fund", too. But the issue with crowdfunding is that if I want to raise $100k on Kickstarter, I need to spend $10k for an agency and another $20k for ads to promote the campaign. So it's quite wasteful (30% just for marketing) unless you already have a large audience willing to pay, which I don't have.

So I believe my best bet might be to partner up with a larger company who will pay for development and/or just charging users for a license. Nuance's Dragon Home is $200 and their Pro version is $500, so there's a lot of room for me to be cheaper while still reaching $100k in revenue with a realistic number of users.

You might be eligible to use Google's TPU Research Cloud for free, provided you publicize your results? https://sites.research.google/trc/about/

Otherwise, perhaps you could ask LAION on #compute-allocation?

Thanks for those excellent actionable suggestions :)

Comments like these are why "Show HN" can be so rewarding (despite all the pedantry about the submission title which I can't change anymore anyway).