
Show HN: AI Grant – Non-profit, distributed AI research lab - danicgross
Hi HN,<p>We have an idea for helping AI research and we’d like to hear your thoughts on it. We want to help get a lot more people working on ML projects they find interesting. If you&#x27;ve been thinking about or working on a side project or have some idea that won&#x27;t let you go, you&#x27;re who we want to reach.<p>Why try to help? Nat and I are passionate about AI. We want to
see more Show HNs that use machine learning. We&#x27;ve been rewarded by
pursuing our own shower-thoughts and want to remove any barriers from
others thinking of doing the same.<p>Our plan for this is AI Grant (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aigrant.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aigrant.org&#x2F;</a>), a non-profit
distributed AI research lab. We&#x27;re issuing grants to the smartest
people we can find, doing interesting work that might otherwise not
happen, and connecting them to mentors, experts, and each other. We ran our first round this spring, and awarded $50k in grants to 10 projects.<p>Filling out the form should take less than five minutes. Grantees get:<p><pre><code>  - $2,500 in cash.
  - $20k each in Google Compute Engine credits.
  - Q&amp;A with AI experts including Andrej Karpathy (Director of AI at Tesla and previously at OpenAI) and researchers at Google.
  - Access to the network of other grantees
  - 250 Tesla K80 GPU hours from FloydHub.
  - $1k in ScaleAPI data labeling credits.
  - $5k in CrowdFlower data labeling credits.
</code></pre>
This is not an investment in a company, it&#x27;s a grant to follow your
dreams in research. You don&#x27;t need to be part of any special
organization or community to apply. We don&#x27;t ask for equity. All we
ask is that you do your best work, wherever your interest lies.<p>Please let us know if you have any ideas or suggestions on how we
might improve, either on the specifics of AI Grant or the general goal
of spreading AI research to everyone smart who wants in.<p>- Daniel Gross &amp; Nat Friedman.<p>P.S. I&#x27;m a partner at YC. This is Nat&#x27;s and my side project, not a
YC effort.
======
orthoganol
IMO what would actually drive AI breakthroughs is to support people on a large
time scale so they can quit their applied AI/ NLP/ Computer Vision jobs and
focus full time on their moonshot research endeavor. For example, I work in
AI, and this is not a useful proposal for me, in particular. But I do have at
least a couple crazy AI ideas that might take > a year to develop, and I can
imagine nothing better than a grant I could live on for a year and develop the
AI. I know I'm not the only one. Someone mentioned a catch-22 with this idea,
have to agree.

~~~
davedx
Have you considered academia?

~~~
orthoganol
Oh God no. The last thing in the world I want is to all of a sudden have to be
publishing a ton of marginally useful crap or spend time reviewing others'
marginally useful crap being sold as contributions because they have to
publish. Or working with students. Why? I already have my big ideas, I have
enough education and experience in the field to do stuff on my own, I just
need a lot of time to hack on stuff and experiment.

I know I'm not the only one.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Precisely this.

And let me use this opportunity to pull out this gem I found once from my
quotes file:

    
    
      "What one wants is to be able to talk with a diverse club of smart
      people, arrange to do short one-​​off research projects and
      simulations, publish papers or capture intellectual property
      quickly and easily, and move on to another
      conversation. Quickly. Easily. For a living. Can’t do that in
      industry. Can’t do that in the Academy. Yet in my experience,
      scientists and engineers all want it. Maybe even a few
      mathematicians and social scientists do, too."
    
      -- Bill Tozier, Diverse themes observed at GECCO 2006

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minimaxir
From the application:

> What's your background? In particular anything that would help convince us
> that you're actually capable of finishing your project.

> Project description: Describe your project, including: where you got the
> idea, how you think others might use it, and how it is new/different/better
> than what already exists. This is the main answer we use to judge
> applications.

These questions make the grant seem like a Catch-22. The people who are
skilled enough at machine learning/deep learning to receive the grant would be
able to be employed at any relevant company for their research.

Thanks to modern machine learning/deep learning tooling, the educational bar
is much lower for more _creative_ projects (e.g. Show HNs) which would have
more _necessity_ for the spare resources. But from the application, that's not
the sense I'm getting.

~~~
jorgemf
> The people who are skilled enough at machine learning/deep learning to
> receive the grant would be able to be employed at any relevant company for
> their research.

Yes, but maybe some of those people want to work on a side project in their
free time. And if you work in deep learning you need some resources to train
your models, so any help is welcome.

------
pinouchon
Great idea. I am curious about how you plan to keep in touch with the
teams/individuals that do get the grant, and how the "AI Grant Network" works
concretely.

My understanding: you get nothing tangible from the grant ("The money is a
gift"), no contracts or IP... To me it seems like a bet that the networks
effects and the gratefulness of the grantees will pay back somehow. I think
this is a smart move because investing in smart individuals is itself smart,
although the devil is in the details.

~~~
danicgross
We're starting off with a chatroom for grant winners, reviewers and some
experts. We have other things planned like Q&A over Hangouts, in-person
meetups and more. We'll treat this like a startup: experiment with a few
options, talk to our users and see what's most useful.

As for value capture, there's no master plan. Getting to know smart people is
enough of a reward.

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tkalil
I'm serving as an advisor to a philanthropist interested in applying AI and ML
to scientific and societal challenges - let me know if you'd like to chat!

Tom Kalil [https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-
kalil-a581/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-kalil-a581/)

~~~
valueprop
Tom, would you please add your email in HN profile? LinkedIn doesn't allow to
connect.

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axhue
Oh man this is so cool, it is amazing how accessible things are compared to
few decades ago!

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Eridrus
You know, I might have misread what you're offering here when I submitted an
application a minute ago, but what I was really hoping was that you would be
able to put me in touch with researchers in the field who would answer my
emails about whether the research topics I was considering were interesting
and promising or not and could help me navigate the academic publication
process. The monetary pieces of this grant are largely irrelevant to me.

~~~
nl
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/)
isn't terrible for this kind of thing. There are plenty of pretty good
researchers who are looking for something to do (other than complain about
NIPS reviews)

------
dhairya
Thank you for sharing and running this. I'm super excited this exists and plan
on applying.

One of the things I've finding difficult to find in my process is actually
mentoring support. You can learn a lot from online resources, but often I have
hit walls where I wish I could ask for help and guidance.

It'd be cool to a version of this with more defined mentoring path, especially
for those who are new to the space!

~~~
danicgross
Great point. We have a chat community which is a start. We'll definitely add
more structured mentoring if more people find it useful.

------
amthewiz
Applied! This is ridiculously timely as I am quitting my job at the end of
this month to take up independent research in general AI.

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sharemywin
To me I would offer a free "desktop buddy" that was open design, open source,
open weights, semi open data(you can volunteer your conversations on a cases
by case basis, product/service reviews could be paid contributions) managed by
a mutual company or a co-op.

There could be a bounty for find bugs and suggesting features.

Maybe charge $2/mo. It would have a fiduciary duty to you as a user to act as
an agent in your best interest. Allow people to contribute to the project
using distributed GPUs(with legal contracts to minimize fraud).

Open budget with bidding and open evaluation criteria.

------
maz1b
Pretty cool. Would apply, but don't have the technical chops just yet (Medical
school is intense). Do you think you guys will run this again if it turns out
to be fruitful?

~~~
danicgross
Yes!

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toisanji
Could we apply if we have started doing some work on our idea already? Or
should it be a brand new project?

~~~
danicgross
Apply either way!

------
iandanforth
Cool idea! Thanks for doing this.

------
BrianMingus
See the Latently Deep Learning Certificate below. We let anyone who wants to
try onboard.

~~~
dang
It's fine to tell people about your related project, but it's not fine to
hijack the thread with comments about it, so please don't.

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852088)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
BrianMingus
Someday perhaps YC's efforts at UBI will trickle down to HN, resulting in a
fair platform that doesn't extremize inequality. In the meantime, us peons are
left to hijack the threads of YC Partners.

~~~
skadamat
Every community has a set of rules you need to abide by, it's really not that
complicated.

------
BrianMingus
See also: Latently Deep Learning Certificate

[https://github.com/Latently/DeepLearningCertificate](https://github.com/Latently/DeepLearningCertificate)

Free access to ridiculous amounts of hardware and the opportunity to implement
important and hot scientific papers and conduct original research in deep
learning.

~~~
nl
There's a "submit" link - perhaps you should try that?

~~~
BrianMingus
I have submitted it numerous times to no effect. This drove a bunch of traffic
so seems to be the way to do it.

