Former Y President Jeff Ralston launches a new AI Safety Fund

Jeff Ralston, well known in the start -up community for his Y -Combinator years, returns to the official investment ring, he declared Thursday.

Its new fund is called the Safe Artificial Intelligence Fund or SAIF, which is both an explanation for his thesis and a word game.

Ralston specifically looking for startups that “improve AI safety, security and responsible deployment” as its fund Website describes. He plans to write $ 100,000 checks as safe, “designed for pun,” he says with a $ 10 million cap. It is safe, of course, the investment now/the price of a later investment instrument before the seeds created by Y Combinator (it means a simple agreement on future capital).

Although most VCs nowadays are looking to invest in launching companies for AI, Ralston’s Take is a little more focused on the idea of ​​Safe AI, although it admits that the concept is a little wide.

“The bigger part of the world projects in the world today use the technology to solve problems or to create efficiency or create new opportunities. They are not necessarily inherently dangerous, but safety is not their main concern,” Ralston tells TechCrunch. “I intend to fund start -ups whose main goal is Safe AI – as I (very wide) I have determined.”

This list includes start -ups focused on improving AI safety, such as those that clarify the AI ​​or AI safety process. It includes products that protect intellectual property, those that guarantee that AI meets the requirements for compliance, combating the misinformation and detection of AI-generated attacks. He also wants to invest in functional AI tools with built-in safety, such as better AI forecasting tools and business negotiation tools with AI activation that will not reveal corporate secrets to outsiders.

This may sound like a list of startup companies for AI that many VCS pursues, but there are areas that Ralston says will not come back. One example is completely autonomous weapons.

“There is certainly the use of AI that (will) will be dangerous: using the technology for the creation of biological farmers, to manage conventional weapons without a person in the cycle, etc.,” he explained.

In fact, he would like to fund “weapons safety systems” that could detect or prevent weapons attacks for AI.

This is an interesting opposite point of view from many of today’s founders of defense and VCS technology. As previously reported TechCrunchSome of the people who build weapons for AI are increasingly sailing the idea that such weapons will be better to work without a person.

However, all things AI are a crowded VCS field these days. It is there Ralston hopes that his YC connections can give him an advantage. Ralston Departed YC in 2022, after three years as president (inherited by Gary Tan) and for over a decade as an advisor.

Ralston plans to offer a mentoring he made at the Store Startup Accelerator and promised to train them how to apply for YC. And he offers to help them join his significant investor network.

Ralston declined to say how big this fund was, how many start -ups intended to support or who supported LP.