Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Alexa Prize

developer.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 59 posts

Re: The Alexa Prize

#41

Post by ssalazar »

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…

>> 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.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#42

Post by wyldfire »

rtkwe wrote: post #38
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.

> create derivative works of

Interesting, seems like they could publish your source under whatever license they chose. It might be in their interest to use a BSD/GPL/MIT license to continue community contribution. Though it might hurt your ability to turn that software into a Conversational-AI-aaS business.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#43

Post by perryh2 »

It'd be cool if someone built a bot that would help you practice another language. I spent years learning Spanish but don't have a partner to speak to in the language.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#44

Post by iandanforth »

Amazon is notorious for this kind of challenge. They offer tiny rewards for huge breakthroughs and then they own any IP submitted. The picking challenge is like this.

"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, and otherwise exercise all intellectual property and other rights in and to any concepts, works, inventions, information, designs, programs, or software that Entrant or his or her Entrant Team develop or submit in connection with the Competition or the creation of the Socialbot,"

Don't let your talented friends throw their IP into this pit!

Re: The Alexa Prize

#45

Post by taneq »

ssalazar wrote: post #41
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…

>> 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 i…

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.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#46

Post by taneq »

Houshalter wrote: post #39
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 T…

Ooh, so they expect the bots to fail a Turing Test because they're superhuman? That makes it easier. /s

Re: The Alexa Prize

#47

Post by alexmlamb2 »

Everyone is complaining that the prize is very small relative to the value of a successful dialog startup.

But I don't see what's bad about this. Amazon is open about how small the prize and presumably that will mean that anyone who has a shot at making a dialog startup won't participate.

So Amazon will probably get a lot of entries from groups that are sort of borderline, which isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#48

Post by socmag »

iandanforth wrote: post #44

Amazon is notorious for this kind of challenge. They offer tiny rewards for huge breakthroughs and then they own any IP submitted. The picking challenge is like this. "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, publ…

Yup, I keep seeing Amazon trying to run these types of events that show very little respect for the intellectual property generated, creativity employed, and time and effort expended.

They are in full on "suck" mode for their own self interest.

Meanwhile throwing tons of money at another thermostat company.

Yawn.

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-alexa-fund-has-invest...

Amazon need to realize that from the outside they appear cheap, arrogant and out of touch with developer mindset.

The Alexa is a good product and worth throwing a lot of money at.

Jeff should be doing whatever it takes to curate and maintain talent and show that customer focus extends as much to the development community as it does to my mother buying windex.

They really need to get serious about developer relations. It's not like they haven't had sufficient warnings, or the opportunity to do something about it.

Re: The Alexa Prize

#49

Post by socmag »

crooked-v wrote: post #4
TY wrote: post #3

I'm curious why only students can apply? Why not allow individual developers or companies as well?

Because Amazon wants good PR and university pipelines for promising future employees, not subsidized contractors.

Churn and Burn

Re: The Alexa Prize

#50

Post by socmag »

alexmlamb2 wrote: post #47

Everyone is complaining that the prize is very small relative to the value of a successful dialog startup. But I don't see what's bad about this. Amazon is open about how small the prize and presumably that will mean that anyone who has a shot at making a dialog startup won't participate. So Amazon will probably get a lot of entries from groups that are sort of borderline, which isn't necessarily the worst thing in t…

Yes it is quite laudable how transparent they are about being cheap SOB's
Post reply on HN