[Houshalter]

>This is hugely under-paid for a worthy winner.

I'm still reading through the competition rules, but it's not clear to me if the winners lose their intellectual property rights. In some past tech competitions I've seen the winners still got to keep their product, the point of the competition was just to get people interested in the domain.

>AI startups are sold way more these days; Amazon would benefit tremendously from a novel technique in that domain.

Are they really though? I've been experimenting for a little bit with neural nets for chatbots. It's always been an interest of mine. I never thought it would have much economic value or interest until now.