
Shannon Labs – $100K Fellowship to support independent researchers - dhash
https://shannonlabs.co/?hn
======
quickben
After reading everything there, I am left with more question than when I
opened the page. Is the page honest?

Who is giving the money?

Why are they sponsoring people?

Only a handful of questions to preapply? Why? There used to be pages like this
only to get people's emails in a target audience for spam purposes, is this
is?

I can apply, I have an amazing idea to pitch, but it looks more shady than
legitimate, sadly.

~~~
parnian1268
Founder here. We have secured partial funding but not all that we intend to
raise. This is just a pre-application - an improved website and application
will be released later. If you submit your application now we'll follow up
with you when we release our full application or convert it automatically.

We're focused on creating a world-class mentorship community before increasing
our Fellow outreach efforts.

~~~
growlix
Very cool idea! Nice to see funding for non-traditional research models.

But I'm a little confused why you made this comment on an earlier HN post
about Shannon Labs:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17675617](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17675617)

~~~
nicklovescode
it was posted earlier, but never made it on the top 10 pages for reasons we
couldn't figure out despite getting plenty of upvotes on /newest. To check if
it was actually alive we posted a couple dummy comments after a while, and
then abandoned the post.

(disclosure, I'm a mentor and the post was sent to a few mentors, which likely
tripped some bot checker)

~~~
confeit
Because you also used a voting ring (next to astroturfing). Admire the hustle,
though a bit too naughty.

~~~
nicklovescode
A few of us think the project is very much worth upvoting! The bot checker
should appreciate that :)

~~~
confeit
That's why I called it naughty and not blatant manipulation. Now if this were
an ICO or a company looking for an easy flip in the overhyped AI market, it
would be different.

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munin
Nice!

Some perspective: the existing, Federal competition in this space is the NSF
GRFP, which is about $165k over five years, instead of $100k for one year.
Obviously if you win the Shannon Fellowship for two years, you are coming out
ahead of the GRFP. The GRFP is also extremely competitive. It does open some
academic doors to you though, since you are paying for your own PhD basically,
advisors don't have to worry about how to pay you, and your ideas had merit to
the NSF so there are two positive signals for you already.

Like some other comment said, science is all about collaboration. Not being
subject to "publish or perish" is nice but a lot of social capital has
accumulated around the black hole of anguish that is the research
infrastructure, it's hard to work with people that aren't on the paper
treadmill because even if you get paid whether or not you publish, your
collaborators don't.

From experience, in research, one year is not a long time. It will go by much
faster than you think. If you have an idea and you need a short runway to just
get started, that sounds about right. Doing anything with human systems seems
perilous though, you can spend months just figuring out how to get lab space
and how to recruit subjects and setting up equipment (oh yeah, I guess this
$100k is also your equipment and space budget). Also from experience, in
research, $100k will go faster than you think.

It would be awesome to win this and whoever is doing this deserves major
credit for stepping up and doing this, but don't get too starry-eyed when
you're thinking about what you could do. If you've got a project already
waiting, "facing downhill" and it needs a push, this sounds like a good
opportunity. If you want to chase a "deep idea" and only have a hazy idea of
where to go, this is probably not what you want.

~~~
rtkwe
Kind of the GRFO is just for graduate students while this seems to be for
anyone in the particular fields of interest as far as I can tell.

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wbl
Bell Labs worked in part because of the architecture of the building
encouraging interaction. I am not sure decentralization will work.

~~~
nicklovescode
I think it’s an open question how the internet will support research
collaboration. There’s clear success stories such as Wikipedia when it comes
to mass scale contribution, but fewer specific research innovations outside of
open source projects. My best guess is that the types of collaborations will
simply be different (The Bazaar and The Cathedral documents this well).

The internet is arguably better at flourishing novel ideas than Bell Labs was.
For instance, machine learning Twitter is an active and relatively small
community. Excellent ideas from obscure researchers often rise to prominence
within hours when retweeted by a more followed researcher. This wouldn’t
happen as often in a building, and the type of idea discovery that Twitter
allows is just the tip of the iceberg. I think it’s worth realizing the
significant downsides to in person collaboration (nothing is saved, it's
entirely flow vs stock, you need enough status to be hired in the first
place).

I was in the first class of the Thiel Fellowship, a decentralized program that
tended to centralize itself anyway in pockets (groups of us rented big houses
and lived together). The combination of in-person and distributed was a great
midway, and I predict the Shannon Fellowship will be similar.

I'm excited to see what the Bell Labs of the Internet looks like, and I think
it's too early to say decentralization will simply not work.

(disclosure: mentor for Shannon Fellowship)

~~~
zawerf
The Polymath Project is another great example of crowdsourced research:

[https://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/polymath.pdf](https://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/polymath.pdf)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project)

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AndrewKemendo
The fact that Joscha Bach is involved gives this more credibility than
anything else.

I'm tempted to apply but I'm guessing the work I want to do is too far afield
of traditional ML work, maybe someone can tell me if that's wrong.

The work I want to do is not in iterations on algos, like I've been working on
with CV problems, but better defining intelligence and building testing
mechanisms for it along the lines of the work of the Anytime Intelligence Test
[1].

Too little is being done on baselining real world intelligence and so what we
get are closed world, fully observable tests, which are impressive, but aren't
really functionally useful when we're trying to build or test AI's
generalization capabilities.

~~~
protonfish
It seems reasonable that before we work on AI, we rigorously define what the
"I" actually means. But maybe that's just us?

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Yea, crazy idea isn't it?

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white-flame
You do need a Google account to get to the pre-application page, just FYI.

(So I'm out. Also, reading about "unconventional" researchers being sought out
is kind of disappointing compared to this likely unintentional requirement.)

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btrettel
Might be worth changing the title to note the subject limitations. "Shannon
Labs – $100,000 Fellowship to support independent intelligence researchers"
works.

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dhash
Hey, OP here.

Parnian (in comments) is a friend of mine and the submitted piece requires
some disucssion. I'm just happy it raised these questions. OFC these questions
are good to answer, and if this succeeds it'll be cool. I'm not sure what the
program will emerge as - still in flux. Most of what other comments bring up
is [IIRC from talking about this]

The website is intended as a fixed figment for the current goals of shannon
labs seems like a nice thing to have to show investors

1\. funding

\- 1 funded, website is tool

\- plan for 10 to alpha

1a. Only 100k?

\- funding spreads this way

\- about enough for a year in pure software

\- could be more but start and grow

2\. motivation

\- More research is good!

\- Unsure about equity free :(

\- In a position to secure funding for a cool project

3\. relationship to academia

\- I'm sure many of these will materialize with academic connections

3a. publishing req?

\- I'm not sure most people will write a paper and submit to a journal. I've
seen a lot of beautiful JS that has been put together as a research artifact.
I like this?

\- I'm pretty sure collab with academia is open

Hope this helps

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kendallpark
Okay, so, what's the catch?

If the motivations behind this are as altruistic as they're made out to be,
props to them. This is EXACTLY what applied healthcare AI
researchers/developers need. Granted, $100K for just one year isn't enough
runway for an end-to-end solution, but I suspect you could get enough of a
ball rolling to pick up sponsors or investors.

Most of the work that needs to be done in this space is NOT sexy. Building
cool AI models is by far the easiest part of the pipeline, even considering
the fact that data acquisition can be difficult. No one wants to get into the
weeds of regulations, hospital protocols, EHR integrations, or HCI issues
pertaining to medical providers. You don't get publications from sifting
through this mess. So most researchers don't touch it. Additionally, the slow
development cycles in healthcare tech are unattractive to many industry
developers. There's a graveyard filled with failed startups and company
initiatives that expected to jump into healthcare with their awesome tech only
to get crushed by at least one of the multiple walls that shield the industry
from innovation.

I personally find myself caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes
to healthcare + AI innovation. If I am being completely honest, I care more
about building a useful product than publishing research papers, and I care
more about improving patient care than making a bajillion dollars. This puts
me in a weird spot in terms of choosing between an academic vs industry route.
My current strategy is to find a way to take the healthcare innovation I want
to do and repackage it as PhD research.

I'd tots apply for this, assuming there's no massive catch. :)

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jamestimmins
I'm curious where the money is coming from to fund this?

~~~
dmix
Seems to be related to OpenAI somehow, based on the team page... maybe the
funding source is the same.

~~~
mappingbabeljc
Hi there, I work at OpenAI. This isn't related to OpenAI in any official
sense, though there are some people involved who either have had links to us
in the past, or currently have links to us.

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nl
For those who aren't familiar, Scott Gray (one of the mentors) is a complete
genius. Two years after he left Nervana his neural network kernels (which
AFAIK haven't been updated since) are still the fastests available:
[https://github.com/soumith/convnet-
benchmarks](https://github.com/soumith/convnet-benchmarks)

~~~
nl
What a weird thing to get downvoted on!

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latenightcoding
I'm sure the people behind this have good intentions and the initiative could
work out, but it's also a little bit bizarre that they have only secured
"partial" funding yet are offering to throw 100k at underfunded ideas.

~~~
dracodoc
It's a chicken egg problem:

\- it'll be easier to persuade investors to put in money when there are good
applications (then "unconventional background" applications will not have big
impact here, people will probably still look at the conventional criteria)

\- with some similar program exist already (aigrants), 100k is needed to
compete with other program, to attract applicants, to grab your attention in
news title...

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DrNuke
The best approach, as often in these cases, is a bona fide private
conversation. Just a very short pitch of your idea and a timetable for the 12
months would suffice, imho, and make clear immediately where you do stand and
them.

------
jlrubin
disclaimer: I know Parni personally, and she did not ask me to chime in here.

Parni's intentions are honest, even if her program is a little bit ill defined
at this stage.

I think she's started this fellowship because she'd observed several of her
friends struggling to find an avenue to pursue their research direction.
Realistically, it's financially difficult for many to pursue a ML PhD when
they can be earning fat stacks in industry. I think that programs like this
help balance out the incentives, for engineers who need normal income.
Programs like OpenAI and Google Brain aren't the last word here, the more the
merrier!

Personally, I'd prefer to see a program which sets up some sort of equity in
an investment fund for ML PhD students. Academia is still probably the best
way to push the frontiers of public knowledge, but its almost insane to forgo
salary & equity comp for 5 years in a high growth field. Making the
opportunity cost of a PhD lower seems like a good outcome.

RE: the question of if there is funding or not, my best guess is that if there
is a good applicant pool it would be highly unlikely the program go unfunded.

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Fomite
Despite being in academia, it's an interesting idea, though I wonder about the
time period (what do you do after that year?) and honestly...I've spent enough
time on the internet that "Independent Researcher" makes me twitch
involuntarily.

~~~
unknownAnon
Don’t think they have figured out what to do after the first year or whether
this turns out as a failed investment for investors ... like lost new gigs
turn out to be.

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unknownAnon
RL;tr. who is behind this ? Who are the investors ?

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rajacombinator
These are not really good fields to target unless you’re planning to fund tons
of psychedelics/chemical research (which is probably illegal) under the
guise/goal of intelligence augmentation. There is tons of research in “AI”
etc. Most of the ideas are bad, it’s not like there are ideas that are getting
overlooked.

