Over the past few months, BlueDot Impact’s Rapid Grants program has quietly funded 77 rapid grants totaling over $50,000 - mostly to course participants and facilitators working on technical AI safety research. Grants are small, decisions are fast, and the process is lightweight.
That program worked. So we’re making it bigger.
The majority of our grants have gone toward compute and API credits for people running evals, training small models, and replicating safety research, typically for a few hundred dollars. Our Technical AI Safety Projects Sprint has been great at surfacing these.
But some of our most impactful grants didn’t look like that at all:
- AI Safety Poland received $4,800 to organize meetups across the country, covering venue and tooling costs, and building a national community from scratch. They’ve had hundreds of attendees, and dozens of people they’ve referred have ended up taking a BlueDot course.
- Justin Dollman received $3,000 to lead our weekly evals reading group, coordinating a growing community of people learning about and working on model evaluations. We’ve since funded more reading groups on AI governance and AI x cyber and are excited about scaling these up from ~120 to 300 attendees per week.
- Sally Gao received $1,000 to run AI Safety meetups in New York, hosting guests such as Alex Bores. Her next event on the State of AI Safety is coming up on April 23rd!
- Eitán Sprejer received $4,200 in facilitator stipends to run our Technical AI Safety Projects Sprint at BAISH in Buenos Aires, accessing a new and underleveraged talent pool for AI safety work.
- Aaron Maiwald received $5,000 to attend a biosecurity conference in DC, travel to SF, and connect with senior folks in the field to accelerate his journey.
- Zac Saber received $8,000 to drop out of EF and validate an AI safety-focused startup instead.
None of these grants fit neatly into “compute for a project.” But they were some of our highest-impact bets. As the program picked up speed and more of these came in, we started treating rapid grants as small, focused bets on talented people doing or experimenting with high-impact projects - research, fieldbuilding, talent acceleration, you name it. In some cases, we approached people directly and pitched them on applying for work they were already doing.
Going forward, we’re expanding the official scope to match our internal understanding: Rapid Grants now fund much more than compute - we’re excited to back work on events, talent acceleration, BlueDot community building, and more. The bar for funding hasn’t changed - if anything we’ve raised it as we became more calibrated - we still look for concrete work in progress, a specific cost that’s the bottleneck, and a reason for us to believe the work matters for making AI go well.
Grant sizes now go up to $10,000 to allow us to make bigger bets for more impact. Decisions will still be fast - we’re targeting around five working days. For grants above $5,000, we may hop on a quick call.
Who should apply
If you’re in the BlueDot community - a course participant, alum, facilitator, or wider community member - and you’re doing something high-impact in one of our focus areas that a grant would accelerate, apply.
If you’re on the fence, the default, as always, is simple: apply.
Apply and see the full list of public grantees and program details at bluedot.org/grants/rapid.
