$250k for your AI-first product startup • Hacker News Board

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#11

Post by bdcravens » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:25 PM UTC

faangiq wrote: post #4

Cool. I wish more people that had “made it” thought of “giving back” in this way.

It looks like it may more of a fund than strictly a grant, despite putting that word in the name.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#12

Post by jedberg » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:25 PM UTC

in3d wrote: post #5

Investments are not “grants.” Very misleading.

The name of the organization is "AI Grant", because they started out giving grants.

They're not saying that they give grants now.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#13

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:27 PM UTC

m00dy wrote: post #3

azhenley wrote: post #2

Interesting pivot. They used to call themselves a "non-profit distributed AI research lab" that gave small chunks of cash to AI researchers. Now they've changed to much larger investments for products/startups. See their HN announcement 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851806

AI popularity is fading away...Maybe that's why.

[deleted]

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#14

Post by atty » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:27 PM UTC

m00dy wrote: post #3

azhenley wrote: post #2

Interesting pivot. They used to call themselves a "non-profit distributed AI research lab" that gave small chunks of cash to AI researchers. Now they've changed to much larger investments for products/startups. See their HN announcement 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851806

AI popularity is fading away...Maybe that's why.

I’d be interested in what you mean by that - VC investment has slowed down, but investment by large firms (tech or otherwise) is only increasing.

And with large language models, generative models, diffusion models, etc becoming more and more common its becoming less novel, but certainly not less popular.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#15

Post by rexreed » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #6

m00dy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI popularity is fading away...Maybe that's why.

Given that the Hacker News frontpage has been taken over by GPT-3/DALL-E/Stable Diffusion in the past couple months, consumer AI popularity definitely is not fading away.

The HackerNews community is not reflective of the general tech, consumer, or business environment. First-hand experience in delivering and selling AI solutions to enterprises and governments plus activity at conferences, venture capital investment, and other measures are showing that interest in AI is generally cooling off, even if there are interesting things happening with generative transformer models, which is where the interest is currently.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#16

Post by Frost1x » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #12

in3d wrote: post #5

Investments are not “grants.” Very misleading.

The name of the organization is "AI Grant", because they started out giving grants. They're not saying that they give grants now.

Sounds like they need to rename their organization to AI Investments.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#17

Post by goethes_kind » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

So like 1 experienced researcher or 2 college grads for 1 year's worth of salary. Putting it through that perspective, it does not seem like much.

Wondering now how much hours of compute this would buy.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#18

Post by ks2048 » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

in3d wrote: post #5

Investments are not “grants.” Very misleading.

So it’s in exchange for equity in the company? They don’t say how much?

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#19

Post by rexreed » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

faangiq wrote: post #4

Cool. I wish more people that had “made it” thought of “giving back” in this way.

What exactly are they giving back? They're taking a cut of your company using a MFN SAFE note, same terms as many seed investors. They just are investing a fixed amount into a very focused niche. It's a seed investment finance play, same story as happened in many other industries from small SaaS-funds to biotech to crypto to quantum and beyond.

Re: $250k for your AI-first product startup

#20

Post by minimaxir » Tue, Aug 30, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

rexreed wrote: post #15

minimaxir wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the Hacker News frontpage has been taken over by GPT-3/DALL-E/Stable Diffusion in the past couple months, consumer AI popularity definitely is not fading away.

The HackerNews community is not reflective of the general tech, consumer, or business environment. First-hand experience in delivering and selling AI solutions to enterprises and governments plus activity at conferences, venture capital investment, and other measures are showing that interest in AI is generally cooling off, even if there are interesting things happening with generative transformer models, which is wh…

DALL-E mini/Craiyon, Midjourney, and Wombo all blew up because of the easy/free accessibility of AI generation tools, to the point of John Oliver doing a sketch about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YNku5FKWjw

The consumer applications will incidentially provide more of an incentive into investing into AI research since there's a good chance of ROI, which will trickle down into better open source AI like Stable Diffusion.