Lightspeed Grants Exploratory Grants (Discontinued)

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Exploratory Grantmaking in Technology program monitors emerging technology landscapes to identify new sectors, tools, and methods with potential that may not yet receive funding from mainstream sources. The program has a significant focus on AI in Science, addressing the reproducibility and transparency of machine learning in research, the philosophy of science applications to ML, and the role of foundation models versus traditional machine learning for scientific discovery. A second focus area, Automation in Science, explores robotics and AI integration to accelerate scientific discovery cycles, particularly in lab and field work automation. The Foundation is particularly interested in concerns about the complexity and opacity of AI-driven research methods and questions about the degree to which AI-generated scientific results can or should be trusted. This program operates on a rolling basis through letters of inquiry (maximum 2 pages) submitted to the program director. Unlike the Foundation's separate Human-AI Interaction Research Grants under the Scientific Collaboration subprogram, the Exploratory Grantmaking program specifically targets early-stage investigations of emerging AI technologies in research settings, making it ideal for novel or unconventional projects that larger funders might overlook. The program is led by Joshua M. Greenberg, Program Director.

Grant Program (Future of Life Institute) is sponsored by Future of Life Institute. The Future of Life Institute offers grants for work focused on studying risks from powerful technologies and developing strategies to reduce them, with the goal of 'winning the wisdom race.' This includes research on existential risk from artificial general intelligence (AI).