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Ryan Kidd: belief

4 Jan 2026 The Cognitive Revolution Building & Scaling the AI Safety Research Community, with Ryan Kidd of MATS

“I think that the way we do it is pretty good and that we have a bunch of, for our model API calls and all that, we have specific organization accounts that we sign people up, and then we kind of give them a budget and so on and top them up as necessary.”

— Ryan Kidd

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Ryan Kidd
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
4 Jan 2026
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

Transcript context

…What about in terms of compute? I know you guys have a, in addition to the stipend that folks get as fellows, there's also a compute grant and I believe it's $12,000 worth of compute. I'm interested in what form that takes. Like, is it just a Brex card that you can go spend on compute wherever you want? Or do you guys have like established compute partners that you work with that, you know, serve your fellows well? How often is that enough? Are there times when people find that they need more compute to do what they want to do? And then if they go work at a nonprofit, like how compute rich or poor are the nonprofits? Yeah. So I mean, Matt's offers 12K. I'll say budget. I won't say like we don't give people a card that says here's 12K. No. they have to justify their compute spending. They have to have an actual project and proposal that they are going to spend that on that necessitates that. And most people don't spend anywhere near that much, which is good because that's part we haven't, we budgeted as if they could, but we really don't want to spend, just waste money on compute. Basically, no one has compute limitations. Sometimes people rarely have needed more than that. We've considered their proposal and thought hard and reallocated funds as needed. And yeah, I think people aren't limited by compute at MATS in general. I think that the way we do it is pretty good and that we have a bunch of, for our model API calls and all that, we have specific organization accounts that we sign people up, and then we kind of give them a budget and so on and top them up as necessary. We do have our own Matt's cluster as well that we maintain online, so our compute team handles that. But typically people tend to use RunPod and other types of self-service things. It depends on the kind of research. There's some types of research that works well on our cluster, and there's some types of research where even with the benefit our compute team can provide in setting up the cluster and maintaining it, the experiments are so customized and so they need to tinker so many things that we just give them a budget and let them use online providers. It's just better that way. We did have used other providers in the past, but that's their current setup. And we're looking at putting together like a kind of customized Claude code kind of suite as well. Hmm. Meaning like building out a bunch of tools or MCP type.…

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