[ssalazar]

>> Amazon will award the winning team $500,000.

>This is hugely under-paid for a worthy winner. AI startups are sold way more these days; Amazon would benefit tremendously from a novel technique in that domain.

They're not paying for a startup with developed tech, established PhD researchers, and a business plan; they're paying students to do research for a year. Assuming a team of 5, $100K/year is very competitive in the academic world unless the students are at the stage of their career where Google recruiters are calling them every day. The likely result of this is something that will have interesting results and maybe a nice demo but will need further refinement in the industry apparatus in order to reach the market.

>> Additionally, a prize of $1 million will be awarded to the winning team’s university if their socialbot achieves the grand challenge of conversing coherently and engagingly with humans on popular topics for 20 minutes.

> This emphasizes further how much those students would be ripped off. Their success is valued at half that of their university, even though they are already paying heavily for that university.

Indeed, this definitely points to the larger imbalance in academic research finance. My university takes a huge proportion of the grant money that faculty win, and reduces aid for graduate students if they independently acquire outside scholarship money.

[taneq]

Divide that $100k/year by the number of entrants and you have the expected payout per student.

I'm fairly sure there are going to be more than three entrants.