One example is therapeutics research. Many people are willing and able to fund research on a disease area, but they don't [1]. One reason is they don't know where to start. Another is that many projects lack transparency for the donor and progress is slow, so it feels akin to throwing money into a pit.
A project like this could work there. Some therapeutics research is actually pretty straightforward [2], even though it's expensive and involves deeply trained people with PhDs and postdocs. Much of that research already happens through abstractions, like CROs for lab work and clinical trials.
This type of project – even if it's currently a failing to build a Claude Shannon website – is one of the rare areas that leads me to feel excited about progress in AI.
[1]: This is still limited to "people with lots of money"; therapeutics research is still incredible expensive and risky (e.g. many millions for bringing a potentially risky therapeutic to human use that will likely fail).
[2]: Excluding hard things like novel delivery mechanisms, new types of treatments, etc.
One feature request: In addition to high-level milestones, it would be cool if a partially-funded project would generate a public, highly detailed implementation plan.
Also, IANAL but MIT is still a license with a copyright holder. I don't think saying "it's MIT, we all own it" is defensible. The courts might view all this code as public domain.
Rather, it did work at milestone 14, but then regressed at milestone 15, where it changed the link from a wikimedia image to a nonexistent file in /assets (despite still having the "Photo via Wikimedia Commons" caption).
edit: they removed it :^)
My question, though, is why the "Live, public build log" only showing up to milestone 3, but the artifacts go up to milestone 15? And there are different index.html pages in the artifacts list, one for milestone 14 and one for milestone 15? Are there different conceptions of "milestone" in here? What's up with that?
(Given the price of tokens, it can even be not entirely a joke.)
This can't be serious.
Broader point I am making is, what differentiates genuine ideas from the token burn? What happens when the pool exhausts but the task is not done?
This bot is almost as bad as I am at estimating projects.
> est. total target $516.00
Lol
Or maybe there is? or a version where only those funding have access to the results.
I doubt an LLM would estimate an AWS rewrite to cost $500.
This is one of those ideas that sounds bad on paper (Like people renting out their houses. But if implemented correctly could get some traction.
There are lots of projects, software that shouldn't be SaaS subscriptions that Fable can build in public that can be free for everyone and also OSS.