AI Internet-Meritocracy Charity Project for Donors

Donating money or crypto to AIIM can support a concrete experiment in alternative funding for science and free software. The immediate goal is to test whether the mechanism works under adversarial conditions, publish what fails as well as what succeeds, and use that evidence to improve the system.

Please, support us. (“Think big, start small” – even a little donation on this beginning stage of the project will have a great effect, so called effective altruism.) Also, please link to this site, to increase its rating on Google, and pass a short survey. Also we welcome volunteer software developers to join.

Project’s importance

This is how both science and software work in modern world:

• Predatory and deceptive publishing practices can weaken quality control, mislead authors, and make it harder to distinguish credible research from inadequately reviewed work.
• Researchers without institutional support or promotion resources may struggle to make useful work discoverable. This can delay recognition and downstream use; it does not mean all subsequent work on the same topic becomes unpublishable. The founder discusses this concern under the term scientific coveries.
• This creates the situation of “missing components” in science. In rare cases, a neglected enabling result may block many downstream developments and therefore have disproportionate value. Determining whether a particular result has that role requires independent technical evidence, a neglected detail may be of tremendous importance, just like as missing water in a desert may be priced as a billion dollars.

Consequences of stuck science

• When useful research is delayed or overlooked, downstream work can also be delayed in fields such as medicine, climate science, computing, and engineering. The size of that effect varies by case, which is why AIIM should be judged by transparent tests and published evidence rather than by broad promises. If you want better future, support the AIIM project.
• An example of stuck science are ordered semigroup actions (OSA), that due to an unfortunate sequence of events stuck in kinda half-published state. You may not know what this means, but the project’s founder argues that ordered semigroup actions may provide a useful unifying framework in mathematics. Its broader practical importance has not yet been independently established.
• Now, before we unstuck science, resources are lost on scientific coveries in a great magnitude. Delayed recognition of useful research can impose substantial opportunity costs, although those costs are difficult to quantify and vary greatly by discovery. Degree and institutional requirements can create barriers for independent researchers. Doctoral study can involve substantial time and opportunity costs, but funding arrangements vary: for example, Princeton covers tuition and provides a stipend during regular PhD enrollment.
• Technology, probably, up to now was making this problem even worse.

What AIIM aims to improve

• AI Internet-Meritocracy explores allocating donated funds using AI-assisted assessments of documented contributions. Using AI does not guarantee fairness or resistance to manipulation. Misleading inputs, biased outputs, and administrative weaknesses are risks to evaluate through adversarial testing, human scrutiny, and comparison with other funding methods. NIST describes relevant generative-AI risks. Whether AIIM produces fairer outcomes remains an unproven hypothesis.
• At sufficient scale, AIIM could provide supplementary or primary funding to some researchers and FOSS developers underserved by conventional institutions. It also proposes incentives for science marketers to improve the visibility of useful work. These are goals, not guarantees that all work will be paid or every discovery adequately publicized.

Proposed expenditures

See here for proposed money expenditures.

Call to action

Supporting AIIM may appeal both to donors motivated by public benefit and to those interested in the long-term economic value of better science.

Project status

See this page for the status of developed/deployed software.