Preamble:

5050 is a program that helps great scientists, researchers, and engineers become great founders. It’s helped launch 78 companies, and now we’re turning our attention to one of the most important challenges of our time: building a safe and aligned AI future.

We created the 5050 AI track to support founders building for this new world. Below are five ideas we’d love to back right now. We believe these are great opportunities to build safe AI, but they’re not the only ones. If you’re building in this space, we want to hear from you.

What's inside:

Mission Control for Agents

Scalable Oversight for Multi-Agent Systems

An independent startup focused on scalable oversight could build the infrastructure and tooling needed to make multi-agent systems production-ready. Beyond selling tools, this company would invest in cutting-edge research to push the boundaries of what's possible in agent coordination and monitoring. The combination of  infrastructure and research would create defensible advantages while accelerating the field's progress.

Hugging Face for Mech-Interp

Model Observability At Scale

An independent startup could democratize mechanistic interpretability by amortizing training costs across developers and providing easy-to-use infrastructure for activation engineering. The opportunity is particularly compelling in regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, utilities, and defense. The business model could combine enterprise subscriptions for custom activation development with inference endpoints for production deployment.

Fort Knox for Models

Classified-Level Data Center Security

We see an opportunity for a startup to deliver infrastructure that meets or exceeds RAND Level 5, as well as to provide a straightforward on-ramp to RAND Levels 3 and 4. The aim is to protect against national security risks while enabling top talent to work on frontier models without productivity penalties. As theft and misuse risks become more salient to regulators and the public, world-class security will become table stakes for AI development.

Space Airlock for Models

Structured Access to Models

We see an opportunity for a startup to provide infrastructure allowing labs to grant granular access to their models. This platform would enable labs to be more transparent and accountable while producing public goods research without compromising safety or commercial interests. The business would amortize infrastructure costs across multiple labs and could expand into providing evaluation and red-teaming services directly.

Psychic Shield for Models

Evals for Mental Health

An independent startup could develop rigorous evaluations focused on mental health-relevant interactions for labs. The company would develop scenario libraries, risk frameworks, and continuous monitoring that labs and platforms can run before and after release, coupled with mitigation guidance that preserves helpfulness. The business model could combine sales of evaluations with consulting services.

Call to action:

Apply to the 5050 AI track here: https://www.fiftyyears.com/5050/ai 

Recommend someone to the 5050 AI track: https://50y.typeform.com/ai-recommend 

Get in touch with me about the requests for startups: gustavs@50y.com