kelly criterion

it's time for full kelly

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

Announcing Kelly Grants: I'm gifting up to $100,000 in AI usage credits & compute to individual researchers.

Up to 10 people, up to $10k each.

No institution required. No equity, no strings attached, just do great research and share it with the world.

Details + how to apply:

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

There are still several spots remaining!

Applications are rolling. No institution needed.

https://t.co/fOmmsf1Td0

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

4. contrasortem (@contrasortem)

Inventing new programming languages and teaching models to write them.

See the bottom right of this chart? The goal is to get a brand new language out of it, and document exactly how much SFT and RL that takes.

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

3. Ben Church (@ChurchVoulgaris)

MIT postdoc, Stanford PhD under Ravi Vakil.

He is focused on number theory and algebraic geometry: rational points on Calabi-Yau varieties, ranks of elliptic curves over function fields, smooth limits of hypersurfaces.

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

2. Vrushank Desai (@vrushankdes)

Founding member of UF's solar car team, then four years designing batteries at Tesla. He left in 2023 for AI.

He's now doing robot learning with very little compute or data. nanoGPT but for robots.

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

1. Maty Bohacek (@matybohacek)

Stanford, ex-DeepMind.

Alignment research keeps citing political science and philosophy as inspiration, but the borrowing is usually loose.

He's going to take those ideas and build them faithfully.

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

Four new Kelly Grant recipients!

Up to $10k each in AI credits and compute for public-good research.

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

Disagree - but nothing to do with politics

The best person for a job is someone with the highest expected capability E after some time T on the job

I'd say E ≈ learning rate * T + Q

Q is current qualification, just a small part

Interviews should be geared toward testing LR

[Paul Graham @paulg]

I believe the most qualified person should get the job.

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

@contrasortem you ok??

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

this is amazing stuff!

[Claude @claudeai]

Starting today, 10,000 scientists across every field, from math to chemistry to physics and more, can get Claude through our new Claude Team plan for scientists. Standard seats are free, and premium seats with 5x usage limits are $15 per month, an 80% discount, for one year.

Claude is becoming increasingly capable of scientific work, with recent progress on problems from advanced physics calculations to protein design. Alongside that progress, we've been investing in the research community: Claude Science launched in June, and our AI for Science program funds high-impact projects with free credits. Today's expansion builds on both.

Principal investigators (or equivalent) at academic and nonprofit research institutions can sign up, then add the researchers in their group. Over the coming months, we plan to extend the program well beyond the initial 10,000 seats.

Learn more: https://t.co/RTG1JxWi4Q

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

Maseeh, 17 yr old Kelly Grants recipient, sharing more of his work!

more Kelly Grants recipients to be announced soon

have actually been reading every single submission as promised

[Maseeh Ghodsi @MaseehG_]

Over 50 years ago, John Leech posed an open problem in combinatorics.

At 17 years old, using GPT-5.6 sol, I proved that no LeechTrees of order-18 exist.

I found 150+ incremental theorems reducing the search space from 10^57 to 10^10.
1/n

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

@vmfunc check out grant program in my bio

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

many people are scared of learning something from scratch

there will always be experts who know a lot more than you now

but even those experts had to start somewhere

imagine yourself at the starting line with everyone else

put in the effort and you can become the expert too

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

I wish I could back every researcher obsessed and passionate about their work

It's unfair that so many people even with amazing credentials are blocked from making more progress by just a couple hundred/thousand dollars

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

Thrilled to share that @SourishJasti is volunteering as a Kelly Grants advisor.

If you're a recipient working on robots, he's a great sounding board.

Thank you to all advisors volunteering their time, and to every applicant looking to share their research with the world.

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

Recipients also get access to volunteer advisors — researchers, AI professionals, and angels who make time to talk through the work.

@willdepue @MajmudarAdam (OpenAI), @CL207, and @izebel_eth are already on board.

Want to give time instead of credits? DMs are open.

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

@GlennMatlin Feel free to add multiple proposals into one submission if you have a lot of ideas

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

Announcing Kelly Grants: I'm gifting up to $100,000 in AI usage credits & compute to individual researchers.

Up to 10 people, up to $10k each.

No institution required. No equity, no strings attached, just do great research and share it with the world.

Details + how to apply:

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

@itskellysun unfortunately my real name is not "kelly criterion"

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

@GlennMatlin will take a look!

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

Building things yourself makes you a better investor

You don't really understand a technology until you're a power user of it. Getting your hands dirty > reading

With AI, it's hard to know where to start

Here are three resources that boosted my learning curve:
https://t.co/aeuA3cns0V
https://t.co/vZnjpUKA3D
https://t.co/MYZ030ollF

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

Apply here: https://t.co/vI38pPmViS

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

Congratulations @MaseehG_ for being the first Kelly Grant recipient!

Maseeh took a question Chan and Pak left open about linear extension ratios of posets and proved their bound works in the fixed-gap range.

He worked alone with GPT-5.5.

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

Announcing Kelly Grants: I'm gifting up to $100,000 in AI usage credits & compute to individual researchers.

Up to 10 people, up to $10k each.

No institution required. No equity, no strings attached, just do great research and share it with the world.

Details + how to apply:

[kelly criterion @thekellycrit]

One person + model access can generate real value.

Hopefully we see more of this through this program.

It costs almost nothing to fund more researchers like this and the upside is enormous.