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
Nuclear makes sense. The fluid-fueled nuclear company he's the chairman of (Transatomic) is considered at least slightly heretical by the nuclear industry, which is used to its solid fuel water-cooled reactors. They also use used nuclear fuel (i.e. transuranics in nuclear waste) as fuel, which could be called heretical because recycling nuclear waste was once outlawed in the US by Jimmy Carter (but it no longer is illegal).
Trouble is that the amounts of money we're talking about don't go far in nuclear research.
I think $10M can go pretty far in basic feasibility studies needed for the Transatomic reactor. You need a bunch of diffusion couple experiments and hydride stability studies. Lots of furnaces, fume hoods, and surrogate fission products. But you're right that when you get to major component qualification then yeah, $10M is nothing.
I meant UPower, not Transatomic. Whoops!
He's also chairman of the board for two nuclear power companies. And YC itself has been branching into biotech and hardware and other science-y companies. Anything seems possible to me.
A 25-year estimate for how long it will take them to develop an AI that will be able to create biological organisms that utilize nuclear power directly? Sounds reasonable.
My money's on nuclear. Advanced nuclear designs regularly claim 25 year timeframes for design, qualification testing, licensing activities, supply chain development, and construction. Transatomic is proposing concepts that require long qualification and licensing developments, many of which could make meaningful progress in a small lab with a $10M initial budget. You have to produce your salt fuel and do materials testing with surrogate fission products (e.g. stable isotopes) over long periods of time. They also have to do hydride transport experiments which can be done on a pretty small scale.
Exciting times ahead!
Whoops, I mean UPower, not Transatomic
25 years is a reasonable number for how long it took deep learning research to begin getting traction. I would think AI would be a strange choice since it seems like there are a lot of research opportunities in academia and industry for this topic, but for the same reason I would say AI research is ripe for disruption.
My bet is on renewable energy/sustainability, agriculture or biotech, with energy being my first choice. Sam has expressed serious concern about powering the future. His first(only?) deviations from the "No Board Seat" policy were two energy companies.
How would funding AI through YC Research be different from what MIRI and FLI do?
Well, they mostly support research designed to prevent harmful AI, which is important but hardly the only or best approach to AI research.
Now if that "AI" were to be changed to "machine learning" that would indeed make me perk up.
Is there any way that AI does not include machine learning?
AI is not really lacking for funding and research activity right now.
Safe AI [1], on the other hand, has [2] running on < $1M and [3] running on $10M (!) from Musk. Throw in Yudkowsky's recently expressed interest in startups [4] and you can guess what I am guessing.
I think "we’ll have a process in place to address technology that could be dangerous" is a pretty strong hint, but it would apply about equally well to AI or nuclear, which are already the top guesses in this thread.