Turing's Dream: Six-week Residency for Programmers to Explore AI deeply

Are you interested in learning from and collaborating with a group of smart, driven peers who're deep into AI like you?

Apply to join Turing's Dream, an AI hackhouse running a six-week residency for coders and researchers who're interested in AI. The hackhouse is in Bangalore, India and you can join it either in-person, or in a hybrid fashion.

We strongly encourage in-person attendance as serendipitous cross-field learning and collaboration becomes difficult in remote. (This is why we don't accept online-only attendence. You must commit to be in the hackhouse at least a few days in a week)

Current status:

• Batch 3 starting Jan '25 (applications open)
• Batch 2 (ongoing)
• Batch 1 (over)

FAQs

What's the deal?

When you join Turing's Dream, you begin with a six-week residency where you build your AI projects. Post that, you become a permanent member of an exclusive community comprising all previous and current residents of the hackhouse.

What do I get from the residency?

Primary benefits:

• Focus for 6 weeks during the residency that motivates and structures what you've always wanted to explore in AI, but haven't found time or bandwidth for it yet
• Cross-disciplinary learning and serendipitous connections. The hackhouse will include people interested in diverse subfields of AI, so you'll learn a lot and make surprising connections in your knowledge
• Inspiring physical space in Bangalore, India. In case you choose to attend in person, we have a space for ~10 people to work in Indiranagar, Bangalore.
• A lifelong community of peers that you'll be part of once you finish the residency

Secondary benefits:

• Free Cloud GPUs (up to ~$2500 per resident, including H100s depending on availability)
• Access to network (of peers, investors, and the founder @paraschopra)
• AI researchers and hackers will drop by regularly. Folks from IISc Bangalore, GenAI Bangalore and Fifth Elephant community are expected to hang around at the hackhouse regularly

What's not included?

Residency is a self-driven program. So while we provide some structure (like daily checkins or weekly huddles), there's no mentorship or a top-down directive. The six-weeks is what you make of it.

Also, there's no stipend. No housing or co-living or food included. Think of the residency as an unpaid sabbatical. You work on your own projects!

What kind of projects can I work on?

Anything related to AI. Implement a new technique. Train a new model from scratch. Benchmark something. Learn and explore an obscure idea. Research something new. Build a tool. Hack something for fun :)

We encourage you to open source the code you end up writing during the residency.

Can you give me a flavor of the hackhouse?

Here are some examples of people+projects you might encounter:

• PhD candidate from an IIT exploring if LLMs can evaluate their own outputs
• Engineer building large-scale vector databases
• Independent researcher developing mechanistic interpretability methods
• Founder of boutique AI consulting firm exploring spiking neural networks and neuromorphic computing
• Former quant at hedge fund building voice-to-voice models
• Neuroscientist exploring meta-cognition and self-deception in humans and AI models
• Full-time maintainer of an open source project to create synthetic datasets for LLMs
• Engineer exploring GPU internals by re-creating Pytorch like library in Rust
• Researcher with PhD exploring reasoning on knowledge graphs
• Researcher with postdoc experience exploring models and pipeline for automating hardware design
• Researcher exploring automatically curating high-quality datasets
• Researcher exploring whether vision models exhibit same biases as humans do
• Engineer exploring optimal-distillation of large models into tiny models with similar accuracy
• Technical founder with previous exits, now creating foundation models

Who should apply?

Apply if: you code and have deep interest in exploring AI deeply for its own sake. If you would work on AI even without getting paid, this is for you.

Don't apply if: you're building wrappers on existing APIs or are looking for a tangible outcome like a co-founder. This is NOT a startup accelerator or a co-founder matching program.

Do I need to have a good understanding of AI before applying?

Yes. We expect you to have an intermediate to advanced understanding of one or more domains of AI. You should be able to code and have a deep interest in AI. This program is not for beginners, but if you're not sure, you can apply and we'll evaluate your application.

Do I need to join in-person in Bangalore?

Yes. We have an inspiring space with ~10 seats in Indiranagar, Bangalore for you to work from.

What's the time commitment?

It's a 6-week residency. You can choose to attend in person or in a hybrid fashion. We expect you to spend at least 15 hours a week on your project + work from the hackhouse at least a few days in a week. But, the more you put in, the more you'll get out of it.

Who's behind Turing's Dream?

Paras Chopra is the founder of Turing's Dream. He's a programmer and entrepreneur who's been working on AI for the last 20 years (he wrote his first Neural Network 20 years ago in Visual Basic :)). He's also the founder of Wingify, a software company that makes VWO.

I have more questions

DM @paraschopra on X or send them here: superdm.me/paras

Partners

Cloud GPU Partner: E2ENetworks

Want to partner? Contact me: superdm.me/paras

Apply here

Fill in your details here and we will get back if we find your profile a good fit for the program!

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