What level of development is required for the pilot project to begin seeking investments?

I am developing pilot project in the automation of natural language (comprehension, understanding, inference and generation; law/IT/healtcare are experimental fields for practical tests) and it has 2 features: 1) it is on the bleeding edge on the science - Artificial General Intelligence and hybrid neural-symbolic machine learning; 2) I want to retain as much control as possible due to ethical concerns, project can have big impact on society and that is why only ethical investors should be allowed. So, is it true: - if the startup is based on the less tested, explored ideas then it should provide far developed pilot project to demonstrate that ideas work indeed; - if I would like to keep the control of my startup and have stronger bargaining power in investment talks then I should show more mature pilot project. What are general guidelines for developing pilot projects before the very start of the investment search.