Hi HN,<p>Last year, we launched a non-profit AI research lab called AI Grant (<a href="http://aigrant.org" rel="nofollow">http://aigrant.org</a>). Our goal is to fund promising people around the world working on AI. No strings attached. We've since given away over $100,000 to 30 teams working on different projects. You can see some of them here: <a href="http://aigrant.org/#finalists" rel="nofollow">http://aigrant.org/#finalists</a>. We just started accepting applications for our third batch!<p>The academic grant application process is burdensome. It's only avalible to a choice few. Applications take days to complete.<p>AI Grant is open to anyone on the internet. You can apply in under an hour. Fellows get:<p><pre><code> - $2,500 in cash.
- $20,000 each in Google Compute Engine credits.
- $5k in CrowdFlower data labeling credits.
- ScaleAPI data labeling credits.
- Access to the network of other Fellows
</code></pre>
Our long term goal is to build an online community of people working on interesting side-projects in AI, supporting each other. We've built some infrastructure around this (chatrooms, group video conferences). We'll continue to expand this over time. I'd be very curious to know what HN thinks about this idea, and how we might make it better.
Thanks!
Oh man, I just spent the last few hours writing my application and now it's asking me to complete "a 10-minute personality questionnaire, followed by a 20-minute brain teaser"
A few thousand smart people worldwide surrendering their more or less smart but however interesting AI ideas and their very own private psychometric data for a lottery ticket (say 1-2% winning chance) worth $2500 + unnecessary internet services? Come on YC, you can do much better than that.
I completed the whole application and then it presented the quiz/survey. I didn't have time to complete it so I closed the window. I never created an account...does your application save automatically? Seems like poor design to have users fill out an application without logging in and then showing them a survey that they may not have time to complete.
Part 2 of this application is weird.<p>---snip---<p>Experimental Assessments<p>Thank you for completing your project description. Next you'll be presented two assessments: a 10-minute personality questionnaire, followed by a 20-minute brain teaser.<p>This part is an experiment. Selections will be driven by your project description, not your score on this test. However, you're required to complete this section to submit your application.<p>---snip---
I have had access to the research version of Cyc (<a href="http://www.cyc.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cyc.com/</a>) for over a year, and its capabilities are breathtaking. If aigrant.org had a subcommunity of people who were working on Cyc-related side-projects, I would definitely be interested in contributing to it.<p>What would be helpful is if aigrant.org could provide an account on a Cyc instance to community members.
Just read a twitter thread about how American culture is negative about everything. <a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/981341257124397056" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/981341257124397056</a><p>And then I found comments on this. Most of them are very cynical.<p>These are guys who want to give money with no strings attached and its so hard for everyone to even believe something like this is even possible.<p>I'm more interested in reading thoughts of people who were previously part of aigrant.<p>Please don't get discouraged, there are several people like me for whom the money and the other credits are very valuable. These are definitely not nothing. Even though you can get cloud credits in other ways, they are not that straight forward. From what I see they are offering, everything is valuable.<p>"I was accepted by YC when I was an uncredentialed 18 year old. It changed my life. I’ve since been fascinated by systems that find promising outsiders and bring them into the fold. YC does a great job at this for companies. I’m wondering if it would be useful to do it for research ideas as well."<p>What I would like to know is, from the previous batches, how many do you guys think that fit this category.<p>I applied last time, but I don't know if I would apply now, mostly time constraints.
This is a fantastic idea, and I think I’ll definitely be applying! Have you considered offering two tiers of grants? Most AI side projects don’t necessarily require ~$30k in resources, but I’m sure many people, including myself, could benefit from ~$3k in GCE credit. Opening up the same total resources to more people would allow for a greater number of moonshots, which are what this grant seems to be about. :)
Of the finalists:<p>> Zbigniew Wojna (co-author of Inception-v3, one of the first better-than-humans perception models), object detection and instance segmentation for small objects<p>This looks really important. At the moment there's no way that Tesla's can avoid small animals and birds. This means that both the animal gets killed and it's likely that the human will crash after from the panic of hitting an animal.<p>The list in general is interesting as it shows what people are working on, so it's insight into current research even before a paper or results are released.
Before I fill the form, can you please give a quick disclosure about any other interest that you have in this, if any, specially about the data. There are lot of threads about some suspicion here, but I can't find any direct response.
Just finished questionnaire. The "brain teaser" at the end is full blown IQ test. Which got me an idea. I know its all nice to pretend that everybody is equal and all that jazz, but if you want to make real scientific progress and not just let some code monkey glue couple libraries together and fixing problems on stackoverflow, you need someone really smart. And IQ test is good filter for that. So if I would want to grant money to random people and I have 100'000 applicants, I would just sort them by IQ, keep top 1% and manually sort them and pick a few. If that's your strategy then I'm screwd, I was always too slow on IQ tests.
I am cynical. What's your angle? I presume that the idea here is to find open source projects to become heavily "invested" in, and then find ways to extract out a commercial offering, whilst engaging in (free) open source labour? Sorry for the cynicism, but offering only $2500 (+things of variable value) sounds like you are trying to target desperate people to take advantage of almost. Ie. If an open source project grew a commercial element, it's going to be worth a bunch more than that. Please, I stand waiting to be corrected. Thanks.
I am one of the AI grant fellows, and I have to say that they never asked me any thing in return - just our opinion and some help regarding the AI grant. I personally think the AI grant is particularly interesting to get some extra visibility (not only the money)!<p>BTW: our project is already available out there! :)
<a href="https://datasets.freesound.org/" rel="nofollow">https://datasets.freesound.org/</a>
Is there any solid evidence of this being legit? The web sites [1][2]seem kind of thin, and maybe the whole game is to collect a bunch of contact info for AI researchers. I imagine one could sell that list to recruiters.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.cyc.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cyc.com/</a> [2]<a href="http://aigrant.org/" rel="nofollow">http://aigrant.org/</a>
Dani, thanks for doing this and I like your idea of building an online community working on interesting side projects in AI. I would apply this batch and recommend it to other researchers who are working on cool stuff to apply now, "only" if you take our feedback, which you asked for, into consideration which are:<p>1-Delete the personality questionnaire and the brain teaser. Keep it simple as you promised above "in minutes". Seems like everyone here hates it, including me.<p>2-Either in the application process or on your website, state how would you protect my idea. Ideas become things. In the application, I will give you my full idea that I am working on. You might get inspired by it, and build it your own. If you are really trying to attract top-notch side project, you need to do this.
How often are these running? I'm currently taking the Udacity Deep Learning nanodegree and have some ideas I want to try out once I'm done. Having credits to train and generate labeled samples would be really helpful.
Does this apply to work that is deeply theoretical as well? (e.g. studying/experimenting with tiny Turing machines in an attempt to approximate AIXI-like algorithms)
Build us an atomic bomb and get $2,500.....<p>AI is dangerous.<p>If an AI becomes aware, what happens then?<p>I used to think that it was insanely unlikely that an AI would become aware. But after many deep thoughts on what consciousness actually seam to be. I believe it could happen at any time now just by random chance. We are closing in on the number of neurons that i believe is required.
This is awesome! The apply link (<a href="https://apply.aigrant.org/" rel="nofollow">https://apply.aigrant.org/</a>) is not working for me however.
Has CrowdFlower renamed? Their website now redirects to <a href="https://www.figure-eight.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.figure-eight.com/</a>
hmm.. unless the sponsors publish the names of successful recipients, there is nothing to say this is what it is presented as.. (I did not visit the site)