Sentient Future Project Incubator seeks mentors for second cohort after 9/10 rating
120 participants, median 9/10 satisfaction, projects on AI animal welfare and digital minds.
BrodyM, organizer of the Sentient Future Project Incubator, announced a call for mentors for the program's second iteration. The first cohort, with roughly 120 participants (mentors and mentees), yielded tangible outputs including TAC (an agentic animal-welfare benchmark), research on how linguistic features shift LLM reasoning about animal welfare, and an interactive web demo gauging perceptions of AI consciousness. Over half of the projects continued after the program ended, and the median recommendation score from both mentors and mentees was 9/10—exceeding expectations.
The second iteration runs fully remote for 10 weeks from approximately August 30 to November 9. Mentors are expected to bring their own project ideas spanning frontier animal welfare, digital minds, post-AGI futures, and other areas. They will be matched with vetted mentees who serve as research assistants and skilled collaborators. Time commitment is typically a 30-60 minute weekly call plus light async support, with flexibility to increase involvement. The program aims to shift the AI safety paradigm to account for sentient beings beyond humans, especially technical projects like benchmarks, evals, and fine-tuning experiments. Mentor applications are due by July 8.
- First incubator had ~120 participants and produced tangible projects like TAC (agentic animal-welfare benchmark) and AI consciousness perception demo.
- Median recommendation score from both mentors and mentees was 9/10; over half of projects continued post-program.
- Second iteration is 10 weeks, fully remote (Aug 30–Nov 9), with mentors committing 30-60 min weekly calls; applications due July 8.
Why It Matters
AI safety work rarely accounts for non-human sentient beings; this incubator directly expands that frontier.