U should apply to Frame Fellowship!

First demonstrator : https://www.nextinsight.org/autonomous-engine/

Hi @MarcusAbramovitch CaML is part of this effort too.

Animal Welfare Midtraining Data Creation

$20,000

Project summary

There is a short window of opportunity to provide mid-training data that helps AI models reason well about animal welfare. Constance Li has been leading a sprint project to get this done with a few people I like (Allen Lu, among others).

This funding slightly funges with Sentient Futures funding, but I’m very okay with that. I’m expecting more money to come into the Falcon Fund, so I am awarding $20k here.

The idea is to train on data where AIs treat animals well and behave admirably towards them, but, most importantly, to explain why the decisions are being made so that, hopefully, this generalizes out of distribution. Fiction is completely fine for this.

I think it's quite reasonable to think “animal welfare people” should be doing this as opposed to lab employees. They have much more nuanced, well-thought-out views on why things are bad for animals, from a variety of philosophical perspectives, and will do a better job of explaining why.

What are this project's goals and how can they be achieved?

Create mid-training data to give to the AI Labs

How will this funding be used?

Pay people to create the mid-training data.

Who is on the team, and what's their track record on similar projects?

Constance Li - Leads Sentient Futures

Allen Lu - Created the MANTA benchmark

Aidan Kanknyoku - Animal welfare alignment team at Anima

Sentient Futures Residents

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)

This turns out not to be that useful; it's quite speculative. It could also just get trained out in RL.

What other funding is this person or project getting?

It's part of Sentient Futures, but they don't have enough money.

Main points in favor of this grant

The project seems good and promising, and I don't know of any other grantmaker who would make this.

Donor's main reservations

I think this is unlikely to have very large effects on models, at least at this scale.

Process for deciding the amount

I think it could use more than this. My main uncertainty is how much funding the Falcon Fund will get.

Conflicts of interest

N/A

Please disclose e.g. any romantic, professional, financial, housemate, or familial relationships you have with the grant recipient(s).

A quick update that did not make it into the locked application: the open memory server and free API are seeing real adoption, roughly 300 active users now and growing, all developer-led and unpaid. If it is useful for evaluation, the live 3D memory graph is at graph.mnemoverse.com and the code is at github.com/mnemoverse/mcp-memory-server. Happy to answer any questions here.

Spec link udpated (it is now in English) https://www.grdprocess.ch/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/AATM_Reproducible_Technical_Specification_PreObject_Sensorimotor_Core_v0_4.pdf

@mariushobbhahn @RyanKidd

I'm sharing an update on my DCB (Dynamic Constraint Boundary) research.

I know you are very busy, so I'm just leaving this here as a follow-up to the email I sent previously. The research is still developing, moving from theory into mathematical formalization and early simulations. I'm posting this so you're up to speed on where I am before the Manifund round concludes in 48 hours.

Whatever happens with the funding, I am not stopping. This project isn't really a choice for me, it's something that keeps me up and demands to be cracked. I'll keep pushing forward regardless.

Thank you for your attention.

Note: This grant was given as part of the experimental alignment microgrant program. Because this is a weird experimental grant program aiming to make lots of unusual bets, grantees are not allowed to use this grant as a credential when applying to any other grant, or job, or on their resume/linkedin/etc. This page exists because Manifund does not allow private grants. If you are a grantmaker or hiring manager, please disregard this grant when making decisions.

Hey @Austin, curious to hear your concerns! Always happy to chat or respond here.

Thank you for your approval and for facilitating the microgrant program.

What progress have you made since your last update?

We published our findings on two novel lytic Salmonella bacteriophages in the paper, Exploring lytic Salmonella phages as potential alternatives to antibiotics: isolation, characterization, and stability assessment of Jerseyvirus ijeoma and Apdecimavirus ayanbimpe (Olorundare et al., 2026). The study demonstrated that both phages are stable under relevant environmental conditions and exhibit strong lytic activity against Salmonella typhi, providing further evidence for their potential as alternatives to antibiotics.

What are your next steps?

Our next step is to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy and safety of these phages in animal models. Successful preclinical studies will position us to advance toward clinical trials and ultimately develop phage-based therapies for patients with multidrug-resistant Salmonella infections.

Is there anything others could help you with?

We are looking for partners to help us take these phages from the laboratory to the clinic. Specifically, we are seeking support to set up the first phage GMP-compliant phage manufacturing facilities and support to conduct early-phase clinical trials.

Approving in my capacity as Manifund admin.

(I'd note that I'm skeptical of several pieces of Rohan's proposal, but for a program like Leo's microgrants, our usual process is to defer the grant recommender's expertise, while Manifund screens for compliance with our charitable mission.)

Funding and approving this project! As a practicing Catholic and also someone who cares a lot about the trajectory of AI, I'm very excited to support this event.

Jessica has pulled together a fantastic cohort of people, many of whom I've long followed and have taught me much about the world. She's also generously volunteering her own time to make this happen. I'm quite sad that I'll be out of town for it -- but excited for the videography to come!

Hey @Fellow-Gemini, I like this work! I know of some resources. Let me know if you need them.

Thank you, @jesse_hoogland ! This means a lot, and I appreciate you recommending the project to @JueYan .

One clarification for anyone reading, since this proposal is about a year old and the milestones have been renumbered. What I called milestones 1 and 2 here are now bundled as M1, and they're done: published as Sparse Concept Anchoring for Interpretable and Controllable Neural Representations at the GRaM workshop (ICLR 2026). The milestone 3 you point to (small transformers) is what I now call M2 — the subject of the new fundraiser below. And the old milestone 4 (language models with real safety targets) has since grown into two milestones: M3 (a small language model trained from scratch) and M4 (retrofitting the method onto an existing open-weights model). Sorry for the confusion.

I've posted a new fundraiser for the next step, M2, here: Concept control in transformers with Sparse Concept Anchoring.

Your reservations are very reasonable.

• Outreach. This is my main worry too. Planned mitigations: 1. posts or a paper for legibility (deliverable 2.4 in the proposal), 2. warm introductions and endorsements, 3. a MATS application in for the autumn cohort (in progress), 4. framing deliverables for adoption by frontier-lab safety teams.

• Transfer. Agreed on focusing on small transformers. The architecture in my new proposal is technically a language model (small transformer with an lm_head), but it stays in a synthetic domain rather than jumping to natural language, so that a negative result is interpretable. I don't want to confound "the method doesn't work" with "I set up an LLM wrong".

  The roadmap then progresses to LLMs: M3 starts with tractable concepts (sentiment, formality, refusal) in a small natural language model before it attempts a safety-relevant target, so I'm not jumping straight to something as abstract as deception.

  So M2 in the new proposal is a toy transformer in a synthetic domain; scaling to natural language is later work. Is that the direction you had in mind, or were you picturing getting to small natural-language models sooner?

@LeoGao

I would like to provide a brief update on this project. Since my initial proposal on Manifund, I have made some progress:

1. Initial mathematical formalization: several core variable relationships within the DCB framework have begun to be formalized, though they are still in the development and refinement stage.

2. Initial Proof-of-Concept simulations: some simple simulations have been conducted to test the basic behavior of the architecture in limited scenarios. The early results show interesting pattern differences compared to conventional approaches, but further testing is still needed.

3. Refinement of variable relationships: I am currently focusing on deepening my understanding of how the variables within this framework interact with each other, before moving to more complex implementation stages.

The proposal I submitted through Tally Forms is an update on this project's journey, and I wanted to make sure this latest information is available before the next round of funding.

Thank you for your attention.

@LeoGao Please...someone taking the time to vet my work truly means more than funding...

Thank you, @LeoGao, for your support!

this program may be an excellent fit: https://bluedot.org/programs/rapid-grants

@adijo in general, I trust grantees to make good decisions about how to spend the money to do cool things.

Note: This grant was given as part of the experimental alignment microgrant program. Because this is a weird experimental grant program aiming to make lots of unusual bets, grantees are not allowed to use this grant as a credential when applying to any other grant, or job, or on their resume/linkedin/etc. This page exists because Manifund does not allow private grants. If you are a grantmaker or hiring manager, please disregard this grant when making decisions.

Note: This grant was given as part of the experimental alignment microgrant program. Because this is a weird experimental grant program aiming to make lots of unusual bets, grantees are not allowed to use this grant as a credential when applying to any other grant, or job, or on their resume/linkedin/etc. This page exists because Manifund does not allow private grants. If you are a grantmaker or hiring manager, please disregard this grant when making decisions.

U should apply to Frame Fellowship!

First demonstrator : https://www.nextinsight.org/autonomous-engine/

Hi @MarcusAbramovitch CaML is part of this effort too.

Animal Welfare Midtraining Data Creation

$20,000

Project summary

There is a short window of opportunity to provide mid-training data that helps AI models reason well about animal welfare. Constance Li has been leading a sprint project to get this done with a few people I like (Allen Lu, among others).

This funding slightly funges with Sentient Futures funding, but I’m very okay with that. I’m expecting more money to come into the Falcon Fund, so I am awarding $20k here.

The idea is to train on data where AIs treat animals well and behave admirably towards them, but, most importantly, to explain why the decisions are being made so that, hopefully, this generalizes out of distribution. Fiction is completely fine for this.

I think it's quite reasonable to think “animal welfare people” should be doing this as opposed to lab employees. They have much more nuanced, well-thought-out views on why things are bad for animals, from a variety of philosophical perspectives, and will do a better job of explaining why.

What are this project's goals and how can they be achieved?

Create mid-training data to give to the AI Labs

How will this funding be used?

Pay people to create the mid-training data.

Who is on the team, and what's their track record on similar projects?

Constance Li - Leads Sentient Futures

Allen Lu - Created the MANTA benchmark

Aidan Kanknyoku - Animal welfare alignment team at Anima

Sentient Futures Residents

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)

This turns out not to be that useful; it's quite speculative. It could also just get trained out in RL.

What other funding is this person or project getting?

It's part of Sentient Futures, but they don't have enough money.

Main points in favor of this grant

The project seems good and promising, and I don't know of any other grantmaker who would make this.

Donor's main reservations

I think this is unlikely to have very large effects on models, at least at this scale.

Process for deciding the amount

I think it could use more than this. My main uncertainty is how much funding the Falcon Fund will get.

Conflicts of interest

N/A

Please disclose e.g. any romantic, professional, financial, housemate, or familial relationships you have with the grant recipient(s).

A quick update that did not make it into the locked application: the open memory server and free API are seeing real adoption, roughly 300 active users now and growing, all developer-led and unpaid. If it is useful for evaluation, the live 3D memory graph is at graph.mnemoverse.com and the code is at github.com/mnemoverse/mcp-memory-server. Happy to answer any questions here.

Spec link udpated (it is now in English) https://www.grdprocess.ch/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/AATM_Reproducible_Technical_Specification_PreObject_Sensorimotor_Core_v0_4.pdf

@mariushobbhahn @RyanKidd

I'm sharing an update on my DCB (Dynamic Constraint Boundary) research.

I know you are very busy, so I'm just leaving this here as a follow-up to the email I sent previously. The research is still developing, moving from theory into mathematical formalization and early simulations. I'm posting this so you're up to speed on where I am before the Manifund round concludes in 48 hours.

Whatever happens with the funding, I am not stopping. This project isn't really a choice for me, it's something that keeps me up and demands to be cracked. I'll keep pushing forward regardless.

Thank you for your attention.

Note: This grant was given as part of the experimental alignment microgrant program. Because this is a weird experimental grant program aiming to make lots of unusual bets, grantees are not allowed to use this grant as a credential when applying to any other grant, or job, or on their resume/linkedin/etc. This page exists because Manifund does not allow private grants. If you are a grantmaker or hiring manager, please disregard this grant when making decisions.

Hey @Austin, curious to hear your concerns! Always happy to chat or respond here.

Thank you for your approval and for facilitating the microgrant program.

What progress have you made since your last update?

We published our findings on two novel lytic Salmonella bacteriophages in the paper, Exploring lytic Salmonella phages as potential alternatives to antibiotics: isolation, characterization, and stability assessment of Jerseyvirus ijeoma and Apdecimavirus ayanbimpe (Olorundare et al., 2026). The study demonstrated that both phages are stable under relevant environmental conditions and exhibit strong lytic activity against Salmonella typhi, providing further evidence for their potential as alternatives to antibiotics.

What are your next steps?

Our next step is to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy and safety of these phages in animal models. Successful preclinical studies will position us to advance toward clinical trials and ultimately develop phage-based therapies for patients with multidrug-resistant Salmonella infections.

Is there anything others could help you with?

We are looking for partners to help us take these phages from the laboratory to the clinic. Specifically, we are seeking support to set up the first phage GMP-compliant phage manufacturing facilities and support to conduct early-phase clinical trials.

Approving in my capacity as Manifund admin.

(I'd note that I'm skeptical of several pieces of Rohan's proposal, but for a program like Leo's microgrants, our usual process is to defer the grant recommender's expertise, while Manifund screens for compliance with our charitable mission.)

Funding and approving this project! As a practicing Catholic and also someone who cares a lot about the trajectory of AI, I'm very excited to support this event.

Jessica has pulled together a fantastic cohort of people, many of whom I've long followed and have taught me much about the world. She's also generously volunteering her own time to make this happen. I'm quite sad that I'll be out of town for it -- but excited for the videography to come!

Hey @Fellow-Gemini, I like this work! I know of some resources. Let me know if you need them.

Thank you, @jesse_hoogland ! This means a lot, and I appreciate you recommending the project to @JueYan .

One clarification for anyone reading, since this proposal is about a year old and the milestones have been renumbered. What I called milestones 1 and 2 here are now bundled as M1, and they're done: published as Sparse Concept Anchoring for Interpretable and Controllable Neural Representations at the GRaM workshop (ICLR 2026). The milestone 3 you point to (small transformers) is what I now call M2 — the subject of the new fundraiser below. And the old milestone 4 (language models with real safety targets) has since grown into two milestones: M3 (a small language model trained from scratch) and M4 (retrofitting the method onto an existing open-weights model). Sorry for the confusion.

I've posted a new fundraiser for the next step, M2, here: Concept control in transformers with Sparse Concept Anchoring.

Your reservations are very reasonable.

• Outreach. This is my main worry too. Planned mitigations: 1. posts or a paper for legibility (deliverable 2.4 in the proposal), 2. warm introductions and endorsements, 3. a MATS application in for the autumn cohort (in progress), 4. framing deliverables for adoption by frontier-lab safety teams.

• Transfer. Agreed on focusing on small transformers. The architecture in my new proposal is technically a language model (small transformer with an lm_head), but it stays in a synthetic domain rather than jumping to natural language, so that a negative result is interpretable. I don't want to confound "the method doesn't work" with "I set up an LLM wrong".

  The roadmap then progresses to LLMs: M3 starts with tractable concepts (sentiment, formality, refusal) in a small natural language model before it attempts a safety-relevant target, so I'm not jumping straight to something as abstract as deception.

  So M2 in the new proposal is a toy transformer in a synthetic domain; scaling to natural language is later work. Is that the direction you had in mind, or were you picturing getting to small natural-language models sooner?

@LeoGao

I would like to provide a brief update on this project. Since my initial proposal on Manifund, I have made some progress:

1. Initial mathematical formalization: several core variable relationships within the DCB framework have begun to be formalized, though they are still in the development and refinement stage.

2. Initial Proof-of-Concept simulations: some simple simulations have been conducted to test the basic behavior of the architecture in limited scenarios. The early results show interesting pattern differences compared to conventional approaches, but further testing is still needed.

3. Refinement of variable relationships: I am currently focusing on deepening my understanding of how the variables within this framework interact with each other, before moving to more complex implementation stages.

The proposal I submitted through Tally Forms is an update on this project's journey, and I wanted to make sure this latest information is available before the next round of funding.

Thank you for your attention.

@LeoGao Please...someone taking the time to vet my work truly means more than funding...

Thank you, @LeoGao, for your support!

this program may be an excellent fit: https://bluedot.org/programs/rapid-grants

@adijo in general, I trust grantees to make good decisions about how to spend the money to do cool things.

Note: This grant was given as part of the experimental alignment microgrant program. Because this is a weird experimental grant program aiming to make lots of unusual bets, grantees are not allowed to use this grant as a credential when applying to any other grant, or job, or on their resume/linkedin/etc. This page exists because Manifund does not allow private grants. If you are a grantmaker or hiring manager, please disregard this grant when making decisions.

Note: This grant was given as part of the experimental alignment microgrant program. Because this is a weird experimental grant program aiming to make lots of unusual bets, grantees are not allowed to use this grant as a credential when applying to any other grant, or job, or on their resume/linkedin/etc. This page exists because Manifund does not allow private grants. If you are a grantmaker or hiring manager, please disregard this grant when making decisions.