Submit Your Questions
We will continuously update this section as we receive questions about the Request for Proposals. You may submit questions using this form.
| Question | Response |
|---|---|
| Eligibility | |
| Are there requirements about the location, composition, or proportion of the applying team? | No. There are no requirements regarding where prime applicants or team members are based or what proportion of the budget or team must be U.S.-based. |
| Is this opportunity open to for-profit organizations? | Yes. This opportunity is open to any organization or institution, including for-profit companies, provided they meet the Demonstrated Experience and Minimum Scale eligibility requirements. |
| Can a consortium of multiple organizations apply, and if so, may the Demonstrated Experience and Minimum Scale requirements be satisfied collectively? | Demonstrated Experience and Minimum Scale eligibility requirements may be satisfied collectively across the named consortium team. There is no requirement that the lead or prime organization independently meet each threshold. |
| Are there restrictions on how many proposals an organization may appear on? | No. There are no restrictions on the number of proposals an organization may appear on, whether as a lead applicant or a subaward partner. |
| Can organizations listed under Existing Resources & Projects serve as funded parties on an award? | No. The organizations listed in the RFP are identified as collaborative resources for grantees and are not eligible to serve as funded parties on awards made through this RFP, including as lead applicants, co-investigators, or subcontractors. They may be cited in proposals as collaborative resources or referenced datasets only. |
| Must the required peer-reviewed publication and prior deployment experience be specifically in the domain of AI tutoring or K–12 education? | Prior peer-reviewed publication and deployment experience from outside the education domain are not automatically disqualifying. However, applicants drawing on work from another field should provide a substantive rationale for how that domain-specific experience translates to effective AI math tutoring, that extends beyond general claims about LLM transferability. |
| Team Composition | |
| May a Principal Investigator or team member from one of the listed Existing Resources & Projects also serve as named key personnel on an applicant’s proposal team? | PIs leading the National Tutoring Observatory and AI Math Tutoring Benchmark projects are not eligible to serve as named team members, as those projects are being funded separately. PIs from the remaining Existing Resources projects are eligible to participate. |
| How important is it that AI model development expertise be represented through named senior personnel versus technical staff and project hires? | Demonstrated experience in large-scale AI model development and improvement is expected for the ML/AI Engineering role, including any combination of post-training techniques, harness-based architectures, agentic approaches, and other model improvement strategies relevant to the team’s proposed approach. Named senior technical personnel with a relevant track record will strengthen a proposal. |
| How should multi-organization or consortium teams structure their submission and budget? | One organization must serve as the lead applicant and named grantee, responsible for receiving and managing all award funds. Partnering organizations should be included as subcontractors or sub-grantees under the lead applicant’s budget, with their costs listed in the sub-award portion of the budget template. Separate direct payments to individual consortium members are not available under this award structure. |
| Scope | |
| Should proposals prioritize modular public goods, or is there an expectation that teams also develop a fully featured student-facing tutoring application? | The program is explicitly focused on modular, reusable public goods rather than standalone end-user applications. A reference implementation demonstrating the model is encouraged, but core outputs should be foundational infrastructure adoptable by others. |
| Is direct incorporation of multiple modalities (audio, video, drawings) expected, or is a combination of text and simulation-based environments considered responsive to the multimodal expectations? | Having some multimodal capacity is important; demonstrated experience and quality in handling multimodal inputs will likely matter more than the number of modalities covered. |
| Partnerships | |
| Does a specific ed-tech partner organization satisfy the requirement that at least one major tutoring ed-tech provider be identified or conditionally committed at proposal submission? | We aren’t able to comment on specific organizations, but proposals should demonstrate that the partner has capacity to integrate and test the model in products in real classroom contexts. |
| Field Testing & Evaluation | |
| Are there minimum scale expectations for field testing (students, classrooms, schools, or districts)? | No minimum student, classroom, or district count is specified, but proposals should demonstrate that field testing involves real students in authentic K–12 contexts that goes beyond proof-of-concept or synthetic data. |
| Open-Source Requirements & IP | |
| Does the open-source licensing requirement apply to pre-existing proprietary training data? | The open-source licensing requirement (CC-BY-4.0 or Apache 2.0) applies to funded developments (i.e., models, code, and artifacts) produced with grant funding. Pre-existing proprietary training data that applicants bring to the project is not required to be publicly released. Applicants should describe such datasets in the Dissemination Plan, including any constraints on release. While open release of training data is not required, making as much of the training data openly available as possible is strongly encouraged. |
| Grant Administration & Procurement | |
| Will indirect costs be limited to align with the BMGF Indirect Cost Policy? | Yes, indirect costs on this project are subject to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Indirect Cost Policy. |
| Who is the funder for this grant, and who will the grant agreement be with? | The funder is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the grant agreement will be between the awardee and the Gates Foundation. |
| Who will review materials submitted via the Qualtrics form? | Applications submitted via Qualtrics will be reviewed by the Gates Foundation team and their evaluators. |
| Are confidentiality restrictions on submitted proposals covered by a non-disclosure agreement or equivalent? | The Gates Foundation and their evaluators will keep all proposal documents confidential. |
| Application & Submission | |
| Is bullet-point or narrative format preferred for the proposal? | Concise, integrated narrative responses are preferred, though charts and tables are explicitly permitted in the Project Plan section and do not count toward the character limit. |