AI Grant gets a sponsor! Thanks, Floodgate

Last Tuesday I wrote that I’d be giving away five grants of $5,000 each to people doing open source work in AI. It was an idea I’d had over the weekend and I thought I’d try it out and see what happens.

The deadline isn’t till April 30th, but nearly 200 people have already applied. And they’re still coming. I was starting to worry that five grants wouldn’t be enough.

But then, on Friday, Ann Miura-Ko from Floodgate emailed me and offered to match the money I’m putting into AI Grant dollar-for-dollar. This is an amazing and generous offer and I’m totally thrilled to have Floodgate’s contribution.

So, AI Grant now has a total of $50,000 to award to AI projects, and instead of five grants of $5,000 each, we offering ten grants of $5,000 each.

Besides improving the odds that one of the projects we fund will make a meaningful contribution to the world, this also doubles your chance of actually getting a grant, if you apply.

I asked Ann why she wanted to contribute. Aside from investing with Floodgate, Ann also teaches at Stanford in the School of Engineering. She works with students regularly and sees how grants like these can support important work. Ann believes that there’s a class of people she calls “Prime Movers” who often start off working on open source projects, and who go on to do many more things in the future. By encouraging these people, we can energize a new set of projects in new categories.

Huge thanks to Floodgate and to Ann for their contribution!