Show HN: AI Grant – Get $2,500 for your AI project in minutes
Hi HN,
Last year, we launched a non-profit AI research lab called AI Grant (http://aigrant.org). Our goal is to fund promising people around the world working on AI. No strings attached. We've since given away over $100,000 to 30 teams working on different projects. You can see some of them here: http://aigrant.org/#finalists. We just started accepting applications for our third batch!
The academic grant application process is burdensome. It's only avalible to a choice few. Applications take days to complete.
AI Grant is open to anyone on the internet. You can apply in under an hour. Fellows get:
- $2,500 in cash.
- $20,000 each in Google Compute Engine credits.
- $5k in CrowdFlower data labeling credits.
- ScaleAPI data labeling credits.
- Access to the network of other Fellows
177 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadI actually had my idea stolen, by a better funded company (yes it involved AI). But that made me even more of a believer.
Even though this other company had far more engineers & was able to replicate a seemingly copycat product after I refused their buyout offer, their execution sucked(which was a key reason I refused, rather die broke than work for a company that think engineers need daily beatings to be exploited properly by great “business” minds)
However, they were VC backed & their board made them shut the product down and we ended up getting all the customers they brought on in the copycat product.
The people behind AIGrant.org have solid geek creds & given their backgrounds can probably come up with more creative ideas than trying to scrape ideas off the web the offering large bounties.
What’s really awesome to witness is that here’s a coupe of geeks actually “executing” on their vision. I’m a little jealous because I should’ve stared something like this, but instead I’d rather just support AIGrant.org because building & executing even benevolent ideas take a ton of effort.
In fact, coming right after the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica "Personality test" news, I wouldn't be surprised if this just a large Honeypot/social engineering demonstration to demonstrate how the HN crowd isn't immune to the same tactics "Take this short quiz and win $XXX".
We're liberal with the definition of AI.
What would be helpful is if aigrant.org could provide an account on a Cyc instance to community members.
See [1], noting that human annotation is responsible for 250K of the 100 million high confidence facts in the system.
I believe they have some manual overrides in a few cases, but the system itself is automatic.
[1] https://research.google.com/pubs/pub45634.html
http://www.cyc.com/mathcraft/
I don't think Google, Bing, Wolfram Alpha, or Siri can be used for applications like this.
It's also fairly useless in that it doesn't give the "commonsense" answer of London as the first result and commonsense is what Cyc has always been supposed to do. (And yes I understand that CityOfLondonEngland probably has a plain English label too).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London
Although London is good enough for me. William Shakespeare would be spinning in his grave.
> 9 ContinentOfEurope
> 10 CityOfLondonEngland
Given it also has 4 & 9 I wonder if that's more of a tag than the name and it just unfortunately lines up with an actual place name. Don't know Cyc to check but I'd wager that if the location was City of London it would output CityOfCityOfLondonEngland.
To be pedantic, only some of the Olympic events were held at Stratford. Horse dancing was held in Greenwich, for example, and many of the over-water events were held on Eton Dorney ("bloody miles away from Stratford").
If aigrant.org was able to provide accounts on a Cyc system to community members, would you be interested in having one?
[1]http://www.cyc.com/ [2]http://aigrant.org/
Feel free to message any of our existing Fellows and ask about their experience.
And being cranky as well, I get it. But this is legit.
- Application form - 100 question personality test - 10 question spatial test prelim - 20 min spatial test - who knows
I applied last time it came up, and had a good discussion that how I wanted to approach wouldn't quite have worked within the scope of the grant. Certainly no hard feelings at all (it was an oddball 3d scanner, like really weird). I felt that Nat was respectful and sincere. I never got even an inkling that this was some scraping scam or something.
Tl;Dr. I've seen a lot of scams through the years. This certainly wasn't (and isn't) one.
---snip---
Experimental Assessments
Thank you for completing your project description. Next you'll be presented two assessments: a 10-minute personality questionnaire, followed by a 20-minute brain teaser.
This part is an experiment. Selections will be driven by your project description, not your score on this test. However, you're required to complete this section to submit your application.
---snip---
Kudos on the process. Nothing wrong with it.
So adding an IQ test changes that to something meaningful, that correlates with AI (what these applications are for). After all, how is a low-intelligence person supposed to make a project in artificial intelligence!
I stand 100% by my support of their process.
There might be a lower limit IQ you might need to be able to hold enough data in your head to archive specific thoughts but i don't think that this limit is very high.
There are enough dedicated human beings out there who are not that smart but dedicated. They are easily able to do projects in artificial intelligence.
AI is not that complicated. It takes probably more stamina than IQ as a lot of research does.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
I will go ahead and guess 127: nearly two standard deviations above the mean. (i.e. IQ-wise in the top 5%.)
Call it dumb all you want: that's just you being modest.
I'm not being modest. I'm lucky to have smart people around me and I know how smart they are and how smart I am, and I'm not that smart. Anyway I've learned not to worry about it. I'm tenacious. That's taken me a long way already.
If it helps, though, I once cheated on an online IQ test for a job. I took it with a friend and we got 130 points together (I didn't like the job).
I guess that means my IQ is somewhere around 65 :P
Here's an example discussion of how this works, drawing on various studies: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/02/stalin-and-summary-stat...
IQ is inherently different. I really support the IQ test they decided to give and I definitely think they should glance at the results - especially to basically approve any applications from people with great results even if the evaluators don't understand the proposed application exactly.
But I think such tests have no relation to the mission. Mandating a short video on capabilities and need of problem area is likely to filter out most candidates. Making video requires effort.
This will get you people who are serious.
Further you could add option to either take test or 15 min video. Just a suggestion.
Plus you might want to change your claim from 'minutes' to 'hours'. You won't put off people who really want to apply and you'll get less people who just want easy money, trying to apply and reacting angrily.
I would suggest to the creators of this that they immediately delete existing data collected through this part of the application until they can put together a proper privacy policy and be more transparent about how they're going to use the data.
[E: this should have been down there sorry]
We need to do a better job communicating that upfront. Will fix now. Thanks again. Some things you can only learn from talking to your users...
Now, I can understand Google trying to be the platform of choice (when in reality, you don't "need" them to build AI), and I can understand startups like CrowdFlower trying to get embedded in that process - but these .orgs need to be more upfront about their agendas.
You're not. While progress in machine learning is astounding and is going to do great things for humanity, it is kind of frustrating that "AI" to many people these days means neural nets, deep learning, high-end GPUs, and huge datasets. Not every problem needs machine learning as a solution, and there are still some of us solving hard problems with classical AI and old fashioned data analysis. But it's not trendy right now.
Anything with a known and well-defined set of rules can also be programmed more efficiently with decision trees/Markov chain than through machine learning. There's no need to use tons of data to train a model to do something over time when all it needs is the rule book.
Machine learning is basically advanced pattern matching, neural nets often require you to brute force the problem with tons of data. There are plenty of places where you're not matching patterns and you don't have tons of data but the computer still needs to make a decision after analyzing the data that is available.
We will also communicate the upfront time investment more clearly.
> Zbigniew Wojna (co-author of Inception-v3, one of the first better-than-humans perception models), object detection and instance segmentation for small objects
This looks really important. At the moment there's no way that Tesla's can avoid small animals and birds. This means that both the animal gets killed and it's likely that the human will crash after from the panic of hitting an animal.
The list in general is interesting as it shows what people are working on, so it's insight into current research even before a paper or results are released.
I don't like it either, but occasionally hitting animals crossing the road is the price we pay for millions of miles of high-speed pavement crossing the country. Hitting small animals is the best outcome in that situation, as opposed to hitting larger animals like deer (where the driver can be killed or seriously injured too).
Please don't brake or swerve for small animals. You could very likely end up killing another person in the process.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/12/17/canada-...
I agree swerving is a problem, but I see no problem with braking. If you brake and the car behind you crashes into you that is their fault not yours. Cars should be maintaining a 3-4s gap precisely because the car in front could brake suddenly at any point.
The law disagrees with you, and that's what matters.
The driver is too close if they cannot stop in time. It's not complicated. It is always the following driver's fault, unless the car in front has defective brake lights.
It obviously is not always the following driver's fault, or that woman wouldn't have gone to jail. You're wrong. It doesn't matter your argument. I provided proof that you're wrong and you're still arguing your wrong argument wrongly and continuing to be wrong.
You can argue with me until I give up and then you can declare victory but you're still wrong, and not only that, you're completely oblivious to the idea that you're wrong. The fact that a woman went to jail for literally this exact thing proves that you are wrong.
Hopefully that makes it clear, even to those of you who didn't read the link that I took the time to find and provide to you. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but you're so obviously wrong and yet still arguing against the law that I feel like I have to make it very clear that you are wrong. Go back and read the link I provided. You're wrong.
There is a significant difference between that and braking sharply.
Freeways are very safe as long as traffic is moving at a more-or-less steady speed. That's why the speed limits can be so high, higher than would be safe if you needed to regularly stop. And people are not used to stopping on the freeway. It takes a long time to come to a stop from 70, 75, even 80mph, and if you're not expecting to have to stop, it can take longer than normal to realize you have to stop. Even in easily-recognizable traffic jams, many people have to emergency brake because they don't realize how long it takes to stop when you're going at freeway speeds.
Freeways are very dangerous places for stopped traffic. It is your responsibility to keep moving in traffic, and if you have to stop, to make sure you stop safely and only when absolutely required.
It was not absolutely required for this woman to stop, it was illegal for her to stop, and this terrible and unnecessary decision cost someone else their life. The fact that the motorcyclist also made a bad judgement call doesn't negate the fact that this driver made a completely unnecessary and illegal decision that cost the cyclist his life.
We are asking people to do a 30 minute quiz once the application is filled out. It’s 100% experimental, but the long term goal is to try and see if there are any ways we can scale this program one day. For example: if it turned out that all the Fellows we funded did terribly on the test, we’d know the test is bad. If they did really well on one question, we’d know we found something that would help us find more people in the future.
We’re not going to sell the applications in any way. Please email me if you have any concerns: daniel@aigrant.org.
It's not HN, it's the world. We live in a society where you have to beg and scrape for healthcare and a job and shelter. Then when you have it, the only way for most to keep it is to sell their labor to a corporation, who doesn't pay you for what it's actually worth (they take a profit). Then, when you go home to improve you life on your own time, the corporation tries to claim ownership over your ideas you work on in your spare time.
What you're proposing, "no strings attached" is counter to almost every expectation we've had our entire lives regarding "a free lunch". i.e. there's no such thing.
I really believe that you are doing this for the best of reason and want to see progress in this field, but there are other parties involved here.
Right, this approach would just select those people who are good at completing IQ tests. Which is a pretty common criticism of IQ tests.
IQ has a higher correlation with future income than parent's earnings. If you had a choice between having 99th percentile IQ and being born into the 1% you'd be better off taking the IQ. The issue is that because IQ is highly heritable many in the 1% tend to be intelligent as well so the rich get richer.
It's important to note here that we're not discussing the well-off, two vacations a year types here, we're talking about the 1%. I would be extremely surprised if the correlation between your future earnings and your parents' earnings (if they are 1%) weren't -a lot- stronger than your having a 99th percentile IQ. Any sources?
I'm sorry, do you have a citation for this? I find this highly suspect. Everything I know about money and power and society suggests the reasons the rich get richer are money, power, and society. Nothing to do with IQ. This idea that the poor are poor because they are dumb is something rich people (who don't want you to be rich) want you to believe.
There is broad clinical and professional consensus that IQ tests are both statistically reliable and valid for a number of generally useful measurements of cognitive ability.
I think you can make a compelling case that IQ tests can be misused as a hiring filter - for example, you might not need to hire people who score highly on it. But as a standalone assessment, modern literature doesn't leave much room for debate on its psychometric merit.
____________________________________________
1. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-67-2-130.pdf
[citation needed]
I think there are credible arguments against using IQ for various sorts of job filters. But I don't think your argument is among them. If we're at the point where we're implicitly taking that an IQ can sort people by "how fast they learn something", the only reason not to sort for that (if that's what you're looking for), is if that quality is more correlated with something else you don't want. I'm not familiar with any research suggesting that high IQ individuals are more prone to stamina or motivation problems in a large population.
We’re trying not to fall into the “just IQ” trap, but learn the broader picture of what makes great Fellows great.
GCE credit might be useful for running GPU instances for training
How?
https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/
Unless I am mistaken. I'd be interested if I was able to find more credits for AWS/GCP/etc
What does this mean? Telling AI Grant about the idea? That doesn't warrant describing it as "surrendering" if so.
> surrendering their AI ideas
Nobody is surrendering anything. The money is literally a gift. We have no rights in whatever they produce.
> private psychometric data
We have a personality test we’re experimenting with for future batches. We’re still making funding decisions based on the application for this batch. If you’d prefer to avoid filling it out, by all means!
> unnecessary services
I disagree! Money and $20,000 in GPU training time is worth a lot. Most of our prior Fellows put it to good use.
> Come on YC
This non-profit is unrelated to my role at YC. Please direct any frustration at me, not YC!
Kind of like "the best minds in a generation are trying to make people click on ads" etc.
Unless some of the existing fundees come forward with verifiable credentials I wouldn't give this a moment
AI is dangerous.
If an AI becomes aware, what happens then?
I used to think that it was insanely unlikely that an AI would become aware. But after many deep thoughts on what consciousness actually seam to be. I believe it could happen at any time now just by random chance. We are closing in on the number of neurons that i believe is required.
2. If a human is aware, what happens then? Not much.
Why is awareness necessary for an AI to be dangerous?
A swarm of armed, autonamous, UAVs is plenty terribad already, and Google's making them smarter. It doesn't take much smarts to "find squishy warm mobile things and put missile there".
I have no idea :) But i am Aware and dangerous, but if that awareness was taken from me and i became unaware a mouse could kill me.
Not saying that awareness (whatever it is) is necessary.
Then it became "we don't even understand how our own consciousness works, or even what it is." So it could be anything. Even a 302 neuron network like the one in the C. elegans worm could be conscious from what we know.
It was more of an instant realization. A realization about how little we actually know.