On Thursday, the Laude Institute announced its first batch of Slingshots grants , aimed at “advancing the science and practice of artificial intelligence.”

Designed as an accelerator for researchers, the Slingshots program is meant to provide resources that would be unavailable in most academic settings, whether it’s funding, compute power, or product and engineering support. In exchange, the recipients pledge to produce some final work product, whether it’s a startup, an open-source codebase, or another type of artifact.

The initial cohort is fifteen projects, with a particular focus on the difficult problem of AI evaluation. Some of those projects will be familiar to TechCrunch readers, including the command-line coding benchmark Terminal Bench and the latest version of the long-r

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