5 ms·

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

213 points by danicgross 9y ago

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/ 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.

BrianMingus 9y ago
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.
- BrianMingus 9y ago
  More info: Latently, Bitfusion, and IBM Cloud enable democratized access to deep learning https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2017/07/latently-bitfusion-ibm-cloud-deep-learning/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2017/07/latently-bitfusion...
- nl 9y ago
  There's a "submit" link - perhaps you should try that?
  - BrianMingus 9y ago
    I have submitted it numerous times to no effect. This drove a bunch of traffic so seems to be the way to do it.
axhue 9y ago
Oh man this is so cool, it is amazing how accessible things are compared to few decades ago!
minimaxir 9y ago
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.
- danicgross 9y ago
  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.
- landon32 9y ago
  Hmm, I think there's a number of people who have some limited AI experience (side project, internship, etc.) but don't have the money to invest in a huge amount of cloud computing hours to do novel research. It doesn't seem like this is something like the Thiel fellowship that's supposed to replace an education, it's just a way to make AI research affordable. I'm sure if I wanted to I could scrape together enough money to do a lot of cloud computing and be able to aggressively try out ideas, but that would cut into money for living expenses. With a grant like this, I would feel much more comfortable just experimenting, not feeling like if I train a model overnight and it doesn't turn out perfectly I lose $10. I don't think a hobbyist can justify using Google/Amazon's best GPU processors, and instead must settle for their cheaper options to feel like they're being financially responsible. I see this AI Grant as a way to solve that problem. AI projects aren't like web-dev projects-- it can take significant amount of money to train a state of the art model in the cloud.
dhairya 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Great point. We have a chat community which is a start. We'll definitely add more structured mentoring if more people find it useful.
Eridrus 9y ago
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.
- yorwba 9y ago
  You could try emailing the authors of some related research papers or professors at your next university. That's basically how I found the advisor for my undergraduate thesis. I had an idea, looked through the CS department's website to find the ML researcher whose work was most similar, then emailed him a proposal. You will probably have to make an effort to differentiate yourself from crackpots and demonstrate pre-existing knowledge of the field. In my case I had to answer a number of questions of the form "I think you may not be aware of XYZ, which is quite similar to your idea." with "The paper on XYZ inspired my idea, but I'm trying something different." A targeted venue that pre-selects for researchers willing to spend their time on mentoring others (who are not officially their students) could help, but it would still have to deal with the crackpot problem.
- nl 9y ago
  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)
toisanji 9y ago
Could we apply if we have started doing some work on our idea already? Or should it be a brand new project?
- danicgross 9y ago
  Apply either way!
amthewiz 9y ago
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.
maz1b 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Yes!
BrianMingus 9y ago
See the Latently Deep Learning Certificate below. We let anyone who wants to try onboard.
- dang 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Every community has a set of rules you need to abide by, it's really not that complicated.
pinouchon 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
iandanforth 9y ago
Cool idea! Thanks for doing this.
tkalil 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Tom, would you please add your email in HN profile? LinkedIn doesn't allow to connect.
orthoganol 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Have you considered academia?
  - orthoganol 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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
  - elementalest 9y ago
    Due to the publication requirements/incentives, academia greatly favours those who take on short term low risk research that will likely result in a few quick easy papers. Furthermore, due to the limited positions available in academia, generally only those who are good at this will rise up in academia. Getting to a point where you control your own research and have financial stability for research that could span 3+ years with very little output (paper wise) is something comparatively few academics achieve. Even fewer of those who have, did so by conducting longer term research. Most academics I know are just trying to produce as many papers per year as they can and do whatever research in their field they can do, to do it.
sharemywin 9y ago
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.

213 points by danicgross 9y ago

BrianMingus 9y ago

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.

BrianMingus 9y ago
More info: Latently, Bitfusion, and IBM Cloud enable democratized access to deep learning https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2017/07/latently-bitfusion-ibm-cloud-deep-learning/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2017/07/latently-bitfusion...
nl 9y ago
There's a "submit" link - perhaps you should try that?
- BrianMingus 9y ago
  I have submitted it numerous times to no effect. This drove a bunch of traffic so seems to be the way to do it.

axhue 9y ago

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

minimaxir 9y ago

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.

danicgross 9y ago
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.
landon32 9y ago
Hmm, I think there's a number of people who have some limited AI experience (side project, internship, etc.) but don't have the money to invest in a huge amount of cloud computing hours to do novel research. It doesn't seem like this is something like the Thiel fellowship that's supposed to replace an education, it's just a way to make AI research affordable. I'm sure if I wanted to I could scrape together enough money to do a lot of cloud computing and be able to aggressively try out ideas, but that would cut into money for living expenses. With a grant like this, I would feel much more comfortable just experimenting, not feeling like if I train a model overnight and it doesn't turn out perfectly I lose $10. I don't think a hobbyist can justify using Google/Amazon's best GPU processors, and instead must settle for their cheaper options to feel like they're being financially responsible. I see this AI Grant as a way to solve that problem. AI projects aren't like web-dev projects-- it can take significant amount of money to train a state of the art model in the cloud.

dhairya 9y ago

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 9y ago
Great point. We have a chat community which is a start. We'll definitely add more structured mentoring if more people find it useful.

Eridrus 9y ago

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.

yorwba 9y ago
You could try emailing the authors of some related research papers or professors at your next university. That's basically how I found the advisor for my undergraduate thesis. I had an idea, looked through the CS department's website to find the ML researcher whose work was most similar, then emailed him a proposal. You will probably have to make an effort to differentiate yourself from crackpots and demonstrate pre-existing knowledge of the field. In my case I had to answer a number of questions of the form "I think you may not be aware of XYZ, which is quite similar to your idea." with "The paper on XYZ inspired my idea, but I'm trying something different." A targeted venue that pre-selects for researchers willing to spend their time on mentoring others (who are not officially their students) could help, but it would still have to deal with the crackpot problem.
nl 9y ago
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)

toisanji 9y ago

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

danicgross 9y ago
Apply either way!

amthewiz 9y ago

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.

maz1b 9y ago

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 9y ago
Yes!

BrianMingus 9y ago

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

dang 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    Every community has a set of rules you need to abide by, it's really not that complicated.

pinouchon 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

iandanforth 9y ago

Cool idea! Thanks for doing this.

tkalil 9y ago

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 9y ago
Tom, would you please add your email in HN profile? LinkedIn doesn't allow to connect.

orthoganol 9y ago

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 9y ago
Have you considered academia?
- orthoganol 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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
- elementalest 9y ago
  Due to the publication requirements/incentives, academia greatly favours those who take on short term low risk research that will likely result in a few quick easy papers. Furthermore, due to the limited positions available in academia, generally only those who are good at this will rise up in academia. Getting to a point where you control your own research and have financial stability for research that could span 3+ years with very little output (paper wise) is something comparatively few academics achieve. Even fewer of those who have, did so by conducting longer term research. Most academics I know are just trying to produce as many papers per year as they can and do whatever research in their field they can do, to do it.

sharemywin 9y ago

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.