Incubated Founder

Advancements in AI bring both opportunities and serious risks.  Atlas Computing takes on society-scale AI risks that no existing institution is built to address — we design the intervention, validate it with domain experts and funders, then recruit and empower the specialist who will own it.

You can think of us as:

• A tiger team that identifies, scopes, and launches interventions that aren't a good fit for existing organizations
• A design studio developing and staffing product requirements docs for coordination and market failures
• A think tank combined with whatever their analog of "tech transfer" would be.

Some of the most important problems in catastrophic AI risk need owners: leaders who identify an overlooked, high-impact, and tractable problem; develop effective interventions; and ultimately take personal responsibility for bringing those interventions into the world.

That’s why Atlas Computing is launching a selective program for people with deep domain expertise and the drive to address the most important risks facing society from growing AI capabilities. Founders will take one problem from a rough direction to a fundable plan: sharpening a concrete intervention, pressure-testing it against the field, building the relationships and founding team to execute it, and leaving with a grant proposal and the backing to pursue it.

Our job is to lower the barriers to entry — both the cost of leaving your current career path and the risk that a good idea never gets off the ground — and to meaningfully raise the odds that the effort you launch succeeds.

Founders will have between six months and two years to research a problem and develop a pitch, but we hold that loosely — a Founder is done when their effort is ready to stand on its own, not when a calendar says so. The goal is for Founders  to develop an ambitious plan as quickly as possible (early graduations welcome), complete with conditionally committed users/stakeholders, an excellent founding team, expert advisors, and organizational plans like milestones — completion consists of pitching funders like Coefficient Giving and launching with an initial grant of around $10 million.