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Comment by laythea | Hacker News Reader

I am cynical. What's your angle? I presume that the idea here is to find open source projects to become heavily "invested" in, and then find ways to extract out a commercial offering, whilst engaging in (free) open source labour? Sorry for the cynicism, but offering only $2500 (+things of variable value) sounds like you are trying to target desperate people to take advantage of almost. Ie. If an open source project grew a commercial element, it's going to be worth a bunch more than that. Please, I stand waiting to be corrected. Thanks.

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Hi laythea! That is an incredibly cynical take. Why are you so default cynical? Anyway, I’ll share my hidden motivations with you, if you like. It’s twofold:

1. I am intellectually curious about AI research. I enjoy talking to researchers. I do it in my spare time. For fun. I would like to do more of that.

2. I was accepted by YC when I was an uncredentialed 18 year old. It changed my life. I’ve since been fascinated by systems that find promising outsiders and bring them into the fold. YC does a great job at this for companies. I’m wondering if it would be useful to do it for research ideas as well.

Lastly, I completely disagree that GPU training time is “of variable value”. It’s a big deal for many researchers.

Hi, thanks for your reply. Yes, sorry for sounding a bit cynical, I will take a look at what you do in more detail, but the sponsors of this venture surely want some return? My, as yet uneducated, layman outsiders guess as to what that return may be would be some IP, derived from these projects? Kind of like growing a tree for birds to lay eggs in and then shaking it to see what drops out. No offense intended. Cheers

It’s a non profit! The IP you develop is yours!

Charities can and do steer activities in a commercially beneficial manner to suit certain stakeholders. I suppose, non-profits are similar.

>> I enjoy talking to researchers.

In that case you should be used to the cynicism (although it's usually called "skepticism" in the field).

I am also curious about the CrowdFlower connection.

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