Who can apply
Anyone in the world can apply. There are no nationality, age, or institutional restrictions. We can wire money via Wise to roughly 180 countries; if your country isn't covered, talk to us — we've paid prizes in five different ways before, including a one-time bitcoin transfer.
Who's ineligible for cash prizes
- Working scientists at frontier AI labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta FAIR, Mistral, xAI, and similar). You may compete; you may not be paid.
- Members of the alphabell board, staff team, or compute committee, while serving.
- Reviewers of the program you applied to.
Output requirements
- Mini-grants, fellowships, and project work: open-source by default. We accept closed-source if you have a serious reason — but we want to hear it up front.
- Competition submissions: top-3 finishers must open-source under MIT or Apache-2 within 30 days of close.
- Hackathon submissions: open-source by default; we'll archive every entry into the public hack archive.
Acknowledging alphabell
Publications: "This work was supported by an alphabell mini-grant / fellowship / hackathon prize." That's all we ask.