rajko_rad

We just launched the third batch of Open Source AI Grants.

These are grants for independent researchers, hackers, and small teams doing foundational work in open source AI.

Our goal is to support the kind of experimentation, creativity, and transparency that keeps the AI ecosystem healthy and innovative.

This round includes projects focused on LLM evaluation, novel reasoning tests, infrastructure, and experimental research at the edge of capability and cognition.

*SGLang: high-performance LLM serving infra powering trillions of tokens daily

*Ostris: diffusion model training tools optimized for consumer GPUs

*Open WebUI: self-hosted AI platforms for full data sovereignty

*SWE-Bench / SWE-Agent: benchmarking and building AI software engineers

*ARC Prize: advancing AGI evals through reasoning benchmarks

*Truth_terminal: exploring AI autonomy and cultural influence via semi-autonomous agents

*Elder_plinius: researching LLM boundaries and prompt engineering strategies

*Janus: exploring AI’s philosophical and creative frontiers

Thank you to all the grantees for pushing things forward in the open. We are proud and grateful to support your work.

Let us know if therre are folks you believe we should support in the future!

wow, I'm not a bio person and had no idea AlphaFold was so complex compared to vanilla Transformers, etc. I wonder newer combinations of LLMs with RL for general reasoning are looking like, sad we might never know haha, but can dive into this in the interim :)

that is the only place they launched, no blog post or anything like that on the website!

Ah yes it’s working now… let me just resubmit, thank you :))

Thanks for the flag !

The actual announcement link wasn’t working an hour ago when we posted it, so we decided as a next best option to post the tweet :/

Appreciate the flag again and thank you for your patience with us here :)

We would love your feedback and contributions! We would also love to hear your thoughts on the future of AI Agent architectures and approaches like those we are building on top of with TreeVoyager! Also feel free to reach out to Marco/Matt if you have any Qs on using the playground to test your agents!

Honored to have you in the inaugural cohort @jph00!!

Awesome suggestions, thank you!

we didn't buy a condo haha, are letting people choose their own housing :)

thanks so much - we agree!

honestly would recommend using spot/rented instances on that budget vs. buying! A100s run around ~$2/hour, the hard part is getting a large allocation... training workloads are quite spikey anyways, usually running lots of smaller experiments before actually doing a larger single run...

feel free to DM on twitter or linkedin. In a nutshell, if you want to pursue a company now in or in the near future, we would likely need to consider you through our normal investing process for equity funding. If you are considering just working on it OSS, we would encourage taking first steps in that direct, and testing community-project fit validation before quite going full or near-full time!

Definitely. This was kicked off in the last month or two when there just seemed to be a bit more happening in OSS LLMs, but we are prioritizing diversifying this for the next cohort!

Love it!! Good luck with the mvps!

And thank you so much for the input - we are meeting the folks at ollama!!

Thank you so much for your work and enthusiasm here!! Unfortunately, that’s roughly the best way to approach it and how most of these have worked so far, demonstrations on smaller models (e.g. 7/13B), with slightly smaller datasets, catching the eye of the community, etc. in general it’s not a bad approach to research too, prove out concepts at smaller scale before scaling up!

Interesting, hadn’t thought of that, thank you! If you want to host end points Replicate is a great option, they also have a newer fine tuning api and solution! for raw VMs with GPUs right now it’s a bit situational and you have to try multiple different vendors tbh, also really depends on the capacity you need and which machines!!

Great callout @htrp... @appenz is our expert here btw !

We agree!!

thank you!! Indeed, we have been interacting in space very closely and doing our best to keep up and contribute where possible

Our pleasure :)

in most cases the teams already had their own source or platform of choice!

if the work is OSS/public and you aren't trying to start a VC-backed company, it could be! We usually want to see some early work already published, community reception and validation, but feel free to DM Matt or myself and we can take a look!

Hi HN, we are super excited to announce this new initiative!!

Please note, this program was designed to support individuals, teams, and hackers who are not pursuing commercial companies. Nevertheless, these projects push the state of the art in open source AI and help provide us with a more robust and comprehensive understanding of the technology as it is developed.

We are really proud to be contributing in this small fashion and grateful to the first cohort and all others contributing in this space!