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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.

Have you considered academia?

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.

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

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.

Obviously I have no clue about your personal situation, but many people working in AI could afford to take a year-long sabbatical after a while. But sure, such a grant may be useful. Most current grants require you to work in academia.

Single Payer Healthcare would accomplish this for a wide swath of the US population for sure. I have savings, our family is willing to use savings to pursue risky projects, but we are not willing to go for long periods of time w/o decent healthcare and we cannot self-fund any decent family plan for extended periods.

Are there any cryptocurrencies that have UBI built in?

Like groupcurrency.org?

You are definitively not alone in this. I know my ideas are kind of crazy, they can work but to validate the research at least one year would be needed. Another one to build a prototype, maybe more to create a commercial product. Which means the whole effort could be about 1M of USD or euro, whatever.

But nobody finances this. Maybe an investor reads this understands that AI is not the next social network or JS framework. It is the pinnacle of human invention and requires that amount of financing.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Yes, but maybe some of those people want to work on a side project in their free time. And if you work in deep learning you need some resources to train your models, so any help is welcome.

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.

This isn't completely true. There are plenty of smart people who eg do Kaggle, and don't have the 300+ hours to invest in twiddling ensembles to actually win but do have the skills and knowledge to develop something new.

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.

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.

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/

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

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

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.

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)

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!

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

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.

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.

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?

Yes!

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

Apply either way!

Cool idea! Thanks for doing this.

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

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.

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.

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

See also: Latently Deep Learning Certificate

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.

More info:

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

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

There's a "submit" link - perhaps you should try that?

I have submitted it numerous times to no effect. This drove a bunch of traffic so seems to be the way to do it.

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