Deep funding combines two ideas:

1. Value as a graph: instead of asking "how much did X contribute to humanity?", ask "how much of the credit for Y belongs to X?"
2. Distilled human judgement: an open market of AIs fills in all the weights, human jury randomly spot-checks them

https://x.com/TheDevanshMehta/status/1867600164502089925

(1) has been a growing paradigm recently, for good reason. Contribution is hard to measure in the abstract: if you ask people how much they would pay to save N birds, they answer $80 for N=2000 and N=200000. "Local" questions like "is A or B more valuable to C?" are much more tractable.

(2) is based on ideas in my info finance post: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/11/09/infofinance.html#info-finance-for-distilled-human-judgement . Anyone can use any methods (eg. AI) to suggest weights for *all* edges, a human jury does detailed analysis on a random subset. The submissions that are most compatible with the jury answers decide the final output.

https://deepfunding.org/

Awesome effort to make the hidden network of open source work legible. OSS is an engine of tremendous economic productivity.

Deep Funding builds a weighted dependency graph of the open source ecosystem to enable fair, automated payments for sustaining developers.

$170k is meaningful, but once fragmented across hundreds of repos, each will receive $50-$5k. The payment is unlikely to cover its own admin overhead.

Our team at Merit Systems is focused on reducing the friction in the last mile and growing the pie. We expect automated incentives for code contributions to hit escape velocity soon. Stay posted for more details.

Building a new economy for Open Source at Merit Systems. 

Prev @a16zcrypto. 

Did my time in big tech, since recovered.

Cracked me up, but you’re absolutely right!