Applications (here) start with a simple 300 word expression of interest and are open until April 15, 2025. We have plans to fund $40M in grants and have available funding for substantially more depending on application quality.
Did you consider to instead commit to giving out retroactive funding for research progress that seems useful?
Aka that people could apply for funding for anything done from 2025, and then you can actually better evaluate how useful some research was, rather than needing to guess in advance how useful a project might be. And in a way that quite impactful results can be paid a lot, so you don’t disincentivize low-chance-high-reward strategies. And so we get impact market dynamics where investors can fund projects in exchange for a share of the retroactive funding in case of success.
There are difficulties of course. Intuitively this retroactive approach seems a bit more appealing to me, but I’m basically just asking whether you considered it and if so why you didn’t go with it.
Did you consider to instead commit to giving out retroactive funding for research progress that seems useful?
Aka that people could apply for funding for anything done from 2025, and then you can actually better evaluate how useful some research was, rather than needing to guess in advance how useful a project might be. And in a way that quite impactful results can be paid a lot, so you don’t disincentivize low-chance-high-reward strategies. And so we get impact market dynamics where investors can fund projects in exchange for a share of the retroactive funding in case of success.
There are difficulties of course. Intuitively this retroactive approach seems a bit more appealing to me, but I’m basically just asking whether you considered it and if so why you didn’t go with it.