Laude Institute announces first batch of ‘Slingshots’ AI grants

In Brief

On Thursday, the Laude Institute announced its archetypal batch of Slingshots grants, aimed astatine “advancing the subject and signifier of artificial intelligence.”

Designed arsenic an accelerator for researchers, the Slingshots programme is meant to supply resources that would beryllium unavailable successful astir world settings, whether it’s funding, compute power, oregon merchandise and engineering support. In exchange, the recipients pledge to nutrient immoderate last enactment product, whether it’s a startup, an open-source codebase, oregon different benignant of artifact.

The archetypal cohort is 15 projects, with a peculiar absorption connected the hard occupation of AI evaluation. Some of those projects volition beryllium acquainted to TechCrunch readers, including the command-line coding benchmark Terminal Bench and the latest mentation of the long-running ARC-AGI project.

Others instrumentality a caller attack to a long-established valuation problem. Formula Code, built by researchers astatine CalTech and UT Austin, aims to nutrient an valuation of AI agents’ quality to optimize existing code, portion the Columbia-based BizBench proposes a broad benchmark for “white-collar AI agents.” Other grants research caller structures for reinforcement learning oregon exemplary compression.

SWE-Bench co-founder John Boda Yang is besides portion of the cohort, arsenic person of the caller CodeClash project. Inspired by the occurrence of SWE-Bench, CodeClash volition measure codification done a dynamic competition-based framework, which Yang hopes volition

“I bash deliberation radical continuing to measure connected halfway third-party benchmarks drives progress,” Yang told TechCrunch. “I’m a small spot disquieted astir a aboriginal wherever benchmarks conscionable go circumstantial to companies.”

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