Rapid Small Grants for the BlueDot Technical AI Safety Project Sprint
Small grants for BlueDot participants to build their portfolio
You are enrolled in our Technical AI Safety Project Sprint. Many technical projects require access to compute (e.g. renting GPUs) or expensive API credits to use frontier models. We want your project to be excellent, and don’t want money to be a barrier for you building your portfolio. If your project will benefit from funding we encourage you to apply to our rapid small grant!
How it works
At all times, only assume we’ll cover costs we’ve confirmed in writing for your specific project. If you’re ever uncertain, contact us before spending money you expect us to reimburse.
Submit a proposal here (under 15 minutes for most applications). We typically respond within 5 working days with one of three outcomes:
Accepted: We’ll confirm exactly what spending we’ve approved.
Clarification needed: We’ll ask follow-up questions to evaluate your request.
Not approved: We don’t think this meets our criteria, or we’re unable to approve for another reason.
Do your project, confident you can spend on what we’ve approved.
Claim reimbursement. We process most claims within 5 working days. If you didn’t end up spending the money, no problem - just don’t submit a claim.
What we fund
The following examples are illustrative; all decisions are ultimately at our discretion:
Compute for a technical AI safety project (API costs, cloud GPU, training runs).
Access to paywalled resources like articles, research papers, datasets, or textbooks.
Hosting costs for your application or tool.
We expect most grants to fall between $50-100 for initial experiments to develop your proof of concept, then up to $500 once you have evidence of initial traction (a strong proof of concept or promising preliminary results). We encourage you to submit a separate application for each of these stages.
What we don’t fund
Compensation for your time on the project.
Equipment you’d reasonably already have (laptops, phones, external drives, etc.)
General productivity subscriptions (ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, Cursor, Grammarly, etc. unless this is highly leveraged).
Personal expenses.
Other funders may cover some of these - see this resources page for AI safety funding opportunities.
When should you apply?
Before applying, you should have a project idea. It doesn’t need to be a slam dunk, but you should:
Be able to briefly articulate how it relates to AI safety.
Have ideas for initial experiments you want to run.
Have a rough estimate for how much those experiments will cost (I recommend using an LLM to help you calculate this).
If you’re unsure whether your application is strong enough, submit an application anyway! We’re not looking for perfection. Your facilitator can also help you stress test your project, so have a low bar for reaching out to them!
While you wait for a grant decision, you should continue to develop your project idea, do a deeper literature review, or start to run smaller experiments that fit on the free Google Colab GPU.
Eligibility
You must be a current or past participant of BlueDot Impact’s Technical AI Safety Project Sprint.
We reimburse via bank transfer (Wise) or PayPal (UK), so we cannot send payments to sanctioned countries.
Questions or feedback? Contact us.
Apply
Submit your proposal here - it takes under 15 minutes for most applications. We aim to get back to you within 5 working days.