Announcing the Second Cohort of Cosmos Ventures

Our latest cohort of 25 grantees includes award-winning philosophers, category theorists, existential psychologists, poets, national champion debate coaches, and Silicon Valley veterans.

Cosmos Ventures backs provocative prototypes at the intersection of AI x human flourishing.

From testing the moral intuitions of LLMs to building economic models for decentralized AI governance, our winners merge human-centered inquiry with technical expertise to chart new paths in AI.

Please welcome them to our growing community, alongside the first cohort.

Jason Zhao and Brendan McCord congratulate our winners at the first Cosmos Ventures Meetup, held at the Story HQ in Palo Alto, CA

Alasdair Milne, Iulia Ionescu, Cezar Mocan, and Murad Khan
A team of leading researchers born from Antikythera's 2024 Cognitive Infrastructures studio
Running an ontological experiment using DeepMind’s Concordia library to explore the concept of "minimum viable interiority."

Alex Priou
Founder of the New Thinkery podcast and founding faculty member at the University of Austin
Creating podcast episodes to explore the intersection of the history of political philosophy and technology.

Andy Han
Former NASA Software Engineer, Philosopher, and Poet
Evaluating AI’s poetic capabilities to understand its creative potential and limitations.

Ari Schulman
Editor of New Atlantis, a leading quarterly magazine on science and technology
Publishing essays to explore human agency in an increasingly automated world.

Caitlin Morris
Builder, educator, and artist at the MIT Media Lab
Designing AI support systems to foster meaningful social connections in digital education.

Clay Routledge
Existential psychologist and Director of the Human Flourishing Lab at Archbridge Institute
To support AI in the American Mind, a survey exploring attitudes towards AI, human flourishing, and progress.

Evan Miyazono
Caltech PhD and former Protocol Labs metascientist
Prototyping formal guarantees to make AI systems more transparent and reliable.

Ginevra Davis
Stanford philosophy student and Senior Editor, Arena Magazine
Researching rational desire in digital minds with implications for AI alignment and human values.

Heath White
Former software engineer turned philosopher, now leads team to understand moral intuitions of LLMs
Testing major language models on the Harvard Moral Sense Test to explore their ethical reasoning.

Joel Christoph
Social entrepreneur and PhD researcher at the European University Institute
Designing economic models for decentralized AI governance aligned with human flourishing.

John Hines
Former National Champion Debate Coach and NSF-funded researcher in AI-assisted argumentation
Enhancing debate education platforms with AI tools grounded in philosophical traditions.

Juan Pedro Cadile
Runner-up of the Cosmos Essay Contest and AI Philosopher at Rochester
Developing a framework for cultivating virtuous dispositions in AI systems.

Kasey Klimes
Ex-Google design researcher and early-stage product consultant
Creating an AI tool to provide structured guidance for ambitious personal projects.

Keir Reid
Cambridge MPhil in Political Thought and History & AI Researcher
Developing a framework to measure and mitigate risks of AI-driven power concentration.

Kevin Carlson
Category theorist and engineer at the Topos Institute
Building collaborative meta-modeling tools to foster cross-disciplinary innovation.

Kuil Schoneveld
Ex-Waterloo-trained Systems Engineer and Philosopher
Building an interactive timeline to map accelerating algorithmic capabilities and articulate the speed of technological change.

Kyle Cureau
Technologist and start-up founder turned literacy expert
Turning philosophical works into engaging, gamified learning experiences.

Matthew Groh
Northwestern Management Professor, head of the Human-AI Collaboration Lab
Using AI-powered role-playing games to boost empathic communication skills.

Matthew J. Dennis
Tech Ethicist at TU Eindhoven focusing on creativity and well-being
Exploring ethical frameworks for using generative AI to enhance human creativity.

Michael Dean
Architect turned writer and former Editor-in-Chief at Write of Passage
Support for the editing of essays on AI x Human Flourishing using an innovative AI evaluation tool named Essay Architecture.

Peli Grietzer
Harvard-trained researcher bridging philosophy, AI, and literary humanities
Defining praxis-based values inspired by virtue ethics to guide AI alignment.

Raphaël Millière
Researcher on the character of neural networks
Developing open infrastructure for AI interpretability research on the concept of variable binding.

Sam Klein
Cofounder of the Public AI Network and Wikipedian
Mapping the development of a global digital library powered by generative AI.

Sarah Chen
Rhodes Scholar studying for a DPhil in Psychiatry at the University of Oxford
Developing an interactive narrative to explore friendship and betrayal between humans and AI.

Seth Lazar
Leading political philosopher on AI at Australian National University
Developing technological and regulatory infrastructure to enable an open agent economy, countering the centralizing power of platform companies building the first capable AI agents.

Stay tuned for future announcements about our next round of fast grants in 2025!

- Jason Zhao, Zoe Weinberg, Alex Komoroske, Darren Zhu, and the Cosmos team