AI Grant
Funding open-source AI projects with no-strings-attached grants
What is AI Grant? Complete Overview
AI Grant provides financial support ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 for open-source artificial intelligence projects. Established in 2017 by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, the program offers grants in either compute resources or cash with no obligations or equity requirements. The initiative has funded diverse AI projects across multiple domains including computer vision, natural language processing, healthcare applications, quantum computing, and creative arts. Target recipients include researchers, developers, and innovators working on open-source AI solutions that demonstrate technical merit and potential impact. The program maintains a strong focus on projects that push boundaries in AI research while maintaining open access to their work.
AI Grant Interface & Screenshots
AI Grant Official screenshot of the tool interface
What Can AI Grant Do? Key Features
No-strings-attached funding
AI Grant provides financial support without requiring equity, intellectual property rights, or specific deliverables from recipients. This allows researchers and developers to focus purely on advancing their open-source projects without commercial pressures.
Diverse funding formats
Grants can be awarded either as direct cash payments (ranging from $5,000 to $50,000) or as compute resources, providing flexibility based on each project's specific needs and requirements.
Open-source focus
The program exclusively supports projects that are fully open-source, contributing to the broader AI research community and ensuring transparency in development and methodologies.
Broad domain coverage
AI Grant has funded projects across numerous AI domains including healthcare diagnostics, quantum computing, creative arts, computer vision, natural language processing, and fundamental ML research.
Prestigious alumni network
Recipients include notable AI researchers and developers, with many projects going on to significant impact in their respective fields, as evidenced by the published papers and videos showcasing their work.
Best AI Grant Use Cases & Applications
Academic Research
Researchers like Zbigniew Wojna (co-author of Inception-v3) have used AI Grant funding to advance computer vision research in object detection and instance segmentation for small objects.
Healthcare Applications
Multiple recipients have applied AI Grant funding to medical applications, including detecting child abuse in X-Rays, interpreting brain stroke scans with 3D CT, and analyzing vascular flow in blood vessels.
Creative AI Development
Projects like generating 3D objects from hand-drawn sketches, creating emotional scenery datasets, and developing neural networks that generate puns demonstrate the program's support for creative applications of AI.
Fundamental ML Research
The program has supported groundbreaking work in areas like GAN applications, neural network validation prediction, and quantum dynamics simulation through machine learning.