Show HN: AI Grant – Non-profit, distributed AI research lab

Hi HN,

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've been thinking about or working on a side project or have some idea that won't let you go, you're who we want to reach.

Why try to help? Nat and I are passionate about AI. We want to see more Show HNs that use machine learning. We've been rewarded by pursuing our own shower-thoughts and want to remove any barriers from others thinking of doing the same.

Our plan for this is AI Grant (https://aigrant.org/), a non-profit distributed AI research lab. We'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.

Filling out the form should take less than five minutes. Grantees get:

  - $2,500 in cash.
  - $20k each in Google Compute Engine credits.
  - Q&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.

This is not an investment in a company, it's a grant to follow your dreams in research. You don't need to be part of any special organization or community to apply. We don't ask for equity. All we ask is that you do your best work, wherever your interest lies.

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.

- Daniel Gross & Nat Friedman.

P.S. I'm a partner at YC. This is Nat's and my side project, not a YC effort.

More info:

Latently, Bitfusion, and IBM Cloud enable democratized access to deep learning

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2017/07/latently-bitfusion...

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.

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 and marked it off-topic.

Thanks for the feedback! I'd love to clarify.

1. We're looking for any information that will convince us that you're likely to complete the project. Academic background is merely one type of proof. A Github profile is another. Or recommendations from peers. Or a record of running marathons. You get the idea. We're open minded.

2. We funded a neural network to generate puns in the last batch. Non-conventional creativity is fine! At the end of the day, the project has to be useful to some humans. Even if it just makes them laugh.