Hacker News Reader

Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com