Lossfunk Initialize

If you want to work on a crazy ambitious research project, we're happy to incubate it.

You propose a research project, and if we find it interesting, we will let you in our community, provide you compute and resources to work on your project. You can work on your project part time, remotely from anywhere in the world.

Who is this for

Misfits. Rebel researchers. That is, if you've thought about doing a PhD, but don't want to go through the traditional route (yet), this is for you.

Here's what you get from Initialize:

• You work independently on a project that you're passionate about, instead of what your advisor/company wants to get done
• You do research for the joy of discovery (with no pressure to write papers)
• You have freedom to work on ideas that might not be acceptable in traditional academia or industry (e.g. pet-to-human translation)
• You can pursue your project part time (we provide compute)
• No course requirements, no exams, no committee meetings. You pick up knowledge as you go along

Kinds of projects we support

• End goal to be state-of-the-art / world's best at a benchmark or a niche (e.g. beat ARC-AGI)
• A new benchmark for AI (e.g. ability of models to play new games, or logical fallacies in reasoning)
• Weird, crazy or unconventional ideas (e.g. decipher Indus Valley script or pet-to-human translation)
• Algorithmic breakthroughs in under-explored ideas of AI (e.g. predictive coding models or continual learning)
• Automated scientific discovery (e.g. discovering new physics laws, or new antibiotics)
• Automated startup creation (e.g. startups that can launch themselves)
• A new sensory modality for humans (e.g. a way to feel Earth's magnetic field, like birds)
• Artificial life and evolutionary systems (e.g. emergent intelligence from simple evolving and communicating agents)
• Sample-efficient learning of world models from sensory data (e.g. human-like performance on unseen games)

For inspiration, here's an (ever-growing) open list of research ideas that we maintain.

What you get

• Brainstorm and collaborate with other researchers at Lossfunk on your project
• Co-work with other researchers at Lossfunk's office in Bangalore (whenever you need to collaborate)
• Compute and resources for your project (as and when needed)
• Access to invite-only Lossfunk community (a private Slack channel where Lossfunk researchers, residents and builders hang out)
• Exposure on socials (200k+ followers) when you get impressive results

What is expected from you

• High ownership of your research project. (Nobody will be your boss, we're your co-researchers.)
• Don't be incremental. We support crazy, ambitious goals.
• Mention primary or secondary affiliation as a researcher with Lossfunk on the papers / preprints based on your research
• Release models/code as open source
• Release your preprints or projects with Lossfunk branding (like here or here)
• Secondary authorship to collaborators at Lossfunk (if you receive non-trivial contributions from them)

How to apply

We judge ideas based on the following four parameters:

• Novelty: What about your research idea is truly novel? Do a comprehensive literature survey and emphasize differentiation of your idea v/s existing approaches
• Audaciousness: In what ways is your proposal audacious? If you're successful, will you be covered by mainstream news? Or will you make an incremental improvement and get a paper out of it?
• Feasibility: Is your idea achievable with today's data, compute, methods and tooling? Have you thought about risks?
• Clear roadmap: Do you have a clear starting point and intermediate checkpoints?

To apply, what you need to do is:

• Do a deep research on your idea using this template, and iterate on your proposal until you are satisfied
• Make a 2-3 min video on your idea, detailing the four criteria above (novelty, audaciousness, feasibility, clear roadmap)/li>
• Make a 2-3 min video showing your technical competency
  • A walk through a publicly available project of yours, highlighting a few technically challenging code snippets you personally coded
  • Or, fix an issue in an open source library of your choice and explain what you did with proof that it fixed the issue

Once you're ready, fill the application form.

If you have questions, please reach out to us.

Here are some testimonials from people who have worked with us