The Personal Story Behind AI Internet-Meritocracy (AIIM)

This page is a first-person account by Victor Porton, founder of Science DAO* and creator of AI Internet-Meritocracy (AIIM). It explains the personal experiences that shaped the project. Statements about my own experiences are autobiographical; claims about the significance of my mathematical work should be evaluated independently from the sources and manuscripts themselves.

Why I started thinking about a different system for science

I am Victor Porton. My path to Science DAO* and AI Internet-Meritocracy (AIIM) did not begin with a business plan. It began with a long personal experience of trying to do mathematical work outside a conventional academic career.

I converted to the Baptist Christian faith on 8 August 1995, when I was 15. In my recollection, conflict with relatives intensified after that. I was repeatedly called a “sectarian,” and religion became a source of serious tension in my family. These experiences strongly influenced how I later thought about institutions, conformity, minority viewpoints, and the vulnerability of people who do not fit established social structures.

I also experienced violence and severe conflict at home. I describe this here because it affected my education and the circumstances in which I began doing mathematics. This page is not intended to ask readers to accept my interpretation of those events as evidence for AIIM. It is context for understanding why questions of institutional access and recognition became personally important to me.

Mathematics outside a conventional academic path

As a first-year university student, I became interested in algebraic approaches to general topology. During a particularly difficult period in my life, I began developing ideas that later became my work on funcoids and related structures. Years later I also developed work on ordered semigroup actions and ordered semicategory actions (OSA).

I have written extensively about these subjects at my mathematics site. Some of the manuscripts are very long and developed outside the normal sequence of degree, adviser, research group, journal papers, and academic appointments.

I consider this mathematical work important. But that is my assessment, not a substitute for independent mathematical evaluation. Readers should judge the work through the definitions, proofs, manuscripts, publications, citations, and independent reviews that exist or may appear in the future.

I eventually left university without a degree. I continued working independently, but I repeatedly encountered a practical problem: substantial research developed outside conventional academic structures can be difficult to evaluate, package, publish, fund, and even bring to the attention of appropriate specialists.

The problem that interested me

My experience led me to a broader question:

Can a useful scientific or technical contribution be evaluated on its substance without requiring the contributor first to succeed at academic networking, grant writing, institutional affiliation, reputation building, or fitting the work into conventional publication formats?

I do not claim that conventional universities, journals, grant agencies, or peer review are useless. They perform important functions, and AIIM itself needs independent criticism and empirical testing. My concern is narrower: existing systems may fail to recognize some valuable contributions, particularly unconventional, interdisciplinary, independent, or difficult-to-package work.

I use the informal term “scientific covery” for an idea or discovery that becomes publicly available but does not successfully enter the normal channels through which research is evaluated, developed, cited, funded, and incorporated into later work. The term is deliberately provocative, but the underlying question is testable: how often does potentially useful work fall between institutional cracks, and can alternative evaluation mechanisms improve this?

Earlier attempts

• Future Salaries. My first approach explored prediction-market-like mechanisms for valuing future scientific contributions. I later concluded that the proposal depended too heavily on the same evaluator whose judgment it was supposed to generate.
• Salaries Science / Grants Science. I next explored a blockchain-based funding mechanism. The idea became technically complex and was not implemented as the main system.
• AI Internet-Meritocracy (AIIM). AIIM is the current experiment: using AI-assisted evaluation to allocate funding based on estimated contribution rather than conventional credentials alone.

What AIIM is — and what it is not

AIIM is an experimental funding and evaluation system. Its AI-generated assessments are not scientifically validated measurements of a person’s “true value,” and they should not be treated as such. They are heuristic outputs produced by models and are vulnerable to bias, gaming, prompt injection, incomplete information, model disagreement, and Goodhart-like effects.

That is why I increasingly see the project not as a finished answer, but as a system that should be tested adversarially, compared with alternatives, audited, criticized, and improved. Science DAO* actively invites independent review of AIIM.

The project also aims to make its limitations visible. The current implementation and governance are transitional rather than a claim that a fully autonomous global scientific funding system has already been achieved.

Why this personal story matters — and why it is not evidence by itself

My biography explains why I care about this problem. It does not prove that AIIM works. It does not prove that my mathematical work has the importance I attribute to it. And it does not prove that existing scientific institutions should be replaced.

Those are separate questions requiring evidence.

What my experience did give me was a persistent motivation to ask whether research funding and recognition can depend less on status and more on inspectable contributions. AIIM is my attempt to turn that question into software and, eventually, into an empirical experiment.

The standard I want the project to meet

If AIIM is useful, it should survive criticism from people who have no reason to agree with me. Its claims should become more precise when challenged. Its failures should be documented rather than hidden. Its evaluation procedures should be tested against manipulation and bias. And where independent evidence contradicts my expectations, the system should change.

That principle is more important than this personal story.

If you want to evaluate the project rather than the biography, start with the AI Internet-Meritocracy overview and the independent review page.

If you want to support testing and development of this experimental approach, you can support Science DAO*. Donations do not turn AIIM’s hypotheses into established facts; they help us test them.