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The Alexa Prize

developer.amazon.com

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Re: The Alexa Prize

#31

Post by vkou »

hunterwerlla wrote: post #28
deanCommie wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently, the Median Amazon tenure was only 0.1 years shorter than Google's in 2013: http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-ranked-by-turnover-...

Although interesting that Google's turnover rate is close to Amazon's, one year turnover is horrible. Other large tech companies (like Microsoft and Apple) have much lower turnover rates.

Tenure is not turn-over. If you double the size of your company every year, but nobody quits, then your average tenure is On the other hand, if you grow your company by 25% year-over-year, and your entire staff quits after 18 months, your average tenure will be >1 year.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#32

Post by drcross »

notyourwork wrote: post #26
jsprogrammer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the Summer of Code for working on an existing open source project? This competition is about producing a SocialBot that Amazon will exploit.

The open source projects are not exploiting in the same way? I am not sure I see your point. Amazon is offering prize awards for projects. I think more companies should start offering these types of opportunities for students to garner industry experience.

By exploited you mean release to the public domain. Big difference.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#33

Post by jsprogrammer »

notyourwork wrote: post #26
jsprogrammer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the Summer of Code for working on an existing open source project? This competition is about producing a SocialBot that Amazon will exploit.

The open source projects are not exploiting in the same way? I am not sure I see your point. Amazon is offering prize awards for projects. I think more companies should start offering these types of opportunities for students to garner industry experience.

My point is that the two programs are not so similar.

One is about bettering community projects, the other is explicitly about creating projects for Amazon to commercially exploit. I'd say it is similar to other corporate hackathons.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#34

Post by muzster »

jt2190 wrote: post #29
espadrine wrote: post #22

I applaud Amazon for the offer. That being said… > 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. > 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 an…

> 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. In that case found a company and exit by selling to AMZN for $FAIR_MARKET_VALUE.

that's not a fair comparison - you would need to "found" many companies (comprising of top grade university boffins)..

This really is a cheap win... for Amazon.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#35

Post by dpc59 »

zeroxfe wrote: post #30
espadrine wrote: post #22

I applaud Amazon for the offer. That being said… > 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. > 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 an…

> This is hugely under-paid for a worthy winner. AI startups are sold way more these days; Sure, but AI startups also crash and burn. This seems like a lower barrier to 500k than going to a startup. > 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.…

Universities already have incentive to up their game in the form of being an university. The potential to get a million dollars if they maybe win some contest is a complete abstraction to the people who manage the establishments finances.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#36

Post by dpc59 »

zeroxfe wrote: post #30
espadrine wrote: post #22

I applaud Amazon for the offer. That being said… > 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. > 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 an…

> This is hugely under-paid for a worthy winner. AI startups are sold way more these days; Sure, but AI startups also crash and burn. This seems like a lower barrier to 500k than going to a startup. > 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.…

Universities already have incentive to up their game in the form of being an university. The potential to get a million dollars if they maybe win some contest is a complete abstraction to the people who manage the establishments finances.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#37

Post by Houshalter »

espadrine wrote: post #22

I applaud Amazon for the offer. That being said… > 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. > 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 an…

>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.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#38

Post by rtkwe »

sigmar wrote: post #6

The intellectual property section towards the end of the rules[1] seems noteworthy (though not unexpected). >Each Entrant hereby grants Sponsor and its affiliates a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, and royalty-free license to make, have made, use, sell, offer for sale, import, export, license, exploit, promote, reproduce, make available, publicly display, publicly perform, create derivative works of,…

At least it's non-exclusive so they can take their tech elsewhere too.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#39

Post by Houshalter »

ChartsNGraffs wrote: post #11

I didn't know the Turing Test was renamed to Alexa Prize

From their FAQ:

>Will this competition be judged like a Turing Test?

>No. The goal of the Alexa Prize is to create socialbots that engage in interesting, human-like conversations, not to make them indistinguishable from a human when compared side-by-side. While the socialbots built for the Alexa Prize will be human-like in some respects, they will be very different in others, and could easily reveal themselves in a Turing Test. For example, socialbots may have ready access to much more information than a human. Asking the socialbots to act human could diminish the customer experience and hinder the efforts of the participants to build the best socialbot to further conversational AI.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#40

Post by badminton1 »

If you possess this technology, you can sell yourself to either Amazon, Google or Microsoft for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.

2.5 million dollars for such capability is by far the most abusive prize ever.

If you have seen "Pirates of Silicon Valley", you would be the equivalent of the guy that sold DOS to Microsoft for $50,000.

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