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YC Research

blog.ycombinator.com

41–50 of 389 posts

Re: YC Research

#41
TIL that Sam Altman has considerably more personal wealth than I would have guessed, if I'd ever been inclined to guess.

Anyway, this is very cool. Exactly the sort of thing that needs to happen to push the world forward in deeper ways. I'll be very curious to see what sort of teams they put together and just how fundamental and long term and heretical they go with their research.

Re: YC Research

#43
Sweet! We'll need more things like this if we want to see our share of societal progress. I have faith that more programs like this will blossom in the coming years.

@sama -is this only for severely resource intense research projects? And do you envision this turning into an alternative to graduate school too?

Re: YC Research

#44
Well I always wanted to be in Y funded startup. Now my dreams become bigger - now I want get to YCR.

Congrats Y team! I'm can't wait to see what you come up for next announcement!

Re: YC Research

#45
post #30

Interesting. I am curious though, as to why YCR researchers will also receive equity in Y Combinator as part of their compensation? Especially given that both are organized separately and YCR discoveries won't be funneled through or used in YC. I am also assuming that YCR will pay market rate salaries.

Above market salaries and also equity. We want to get the best people in the world, and I think YC equity is a pretty compelling thing to get. We're competing against e.g. Google, and Google stock is also a pretty compelling thing to get!

Gotcha. So this is more about getting brilliant minds in media res, as opposed to discovering fledgling great researchers of tomorrow. Good lure; YC equity is probably increasingly more compelling than Google's!

Re: YC Research

#46
post #26
post #3

@sama - are the members of these groups going to be selected by YC or will there be an application process similar to YC? This is awesome to see, maybe YCR could be the next Bell Labs or something (although Google probably has a hold on that now).

Microsoft Research is also an excellent organization for CS related research.

Do they have similar policies with regards to openness as YC's research lab?

Re: YC Research

#47
post #2

This looks amazing ... a modern Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.

Bell Labs had an annual budget of over 3 billion since the 80s.

You are making a wrong correlation. Putting more money won't necessarily drive research forward. Most breakthrough researches and inventions were done with little money.

Re: YC Research

#48
I like this idea; it's pretty novel. Since there is just one group starting this off, which makes a ton of sense from a funding perspective, is this an MVP or a long term bet with regards to this specific group? Meaning if this group has trouble getting their idea off the ground in the next 1-2 months, do they get scrapped or are they going to have years to conduct their research?

An idea for future research may be to do almost like a round of start-ups where a bunch of groups come to SF for 3 months but unlike start-ups you find the promising ones and keep them all and drop any that do not look promising. Basically thinking of ways to not put all your eggs in one basic. Naturally this becomes quite problematic if you're researching something highly complex that won't show signs of promise for a decade!

Re: YC Research

#49
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any helpful teasers on what that domain might be ?

Sam has expressed his desired to get really good AI to become a thing. Since YC does a ton of tech I'd bet $10 it's AI. But of course this is just my useless speculation :)

Nuclear would also make sense? AI might make more sense becaues nuclear seems like a hard place to do "heretical" research, but what do I know
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