
The Alexa Prize - nburger
https://developer.amazon.com/alexaprize
======
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!

~~~
socmag
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...](http://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-alexa-fund-has-
invested-35-million-into-a-smart-thermostat-2016-9)

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.

------
espadrine
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 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.

More to the point, a bot that fits this description is a major achievement,
beyond Siri and Cortana — which both have a much, much larger value than a
million dollars.

I understand that the point is to convince universities to grant their
students more time to work on that project, and universities tend not to care
about pocket money. However, this ⅓ / ⅔ cut is unbalanced.

~~~
zeroxfe
> 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.

This does bother me too, but I can see how it incentivizes universities to up
their game.

~~~
dpc59
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.

------
sigmar
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, 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,
including any of the foregoing included or described in any Technical Article
or other materials provided to Sponsor.

[1] [https://developer.amazon.com/alexaprize/contest-
rules](https://developer.amazon.com/alexaprize/contest-rules)

~~~
serge2k
So if you have something capable of winning this prize, how much more would it
be worth to keep it?

~~~
toomuchtodo
Whatever OpenAI might offer, which I'd argue is a better steward of the
resulting knowledge than Amazon.

If OpenAI would release an Alexa hardware competitor, I'd pay whatever it cost
in a heartbeat, as I'd know it was being used to increase the data corpus of a
non-profit versus Amazon.

~~~
llamataboot
What about Mycroft?

[https://mycroft.ai/](https://mycroft.ai/)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Non-profit?

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

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

~~~
socmag
Churn and Burn

------
CGamesPlay
Is it just me, or does 1 month seem like a really short time frame for the
initial invocation of this contest? Why couldn't they set the deadline farther
back?

------
partycoder
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.

------
notyourwork
I think this program is great and similarly reminds me of Google Summer of
Code. The biggest deficiency I see with new engineers is lack of real
experience. GSOC, this Amazon program, these give students the chance to build
a real thing that does something. Too many students come out of school with
their theoretical assignments completed, and basic hello world programs.

I hope Amazon receives great submissions from this!

~~~
jsprogrammer
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.

~~~
notyourwork
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.

~~~
jsprogrammer
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.

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

~~~
gavinpc
If the Turing Test stipulated that the human were a politician, it would have
been beaten many years ago.

> You know, that's a very interesting point. I tend to agree with what you're
> saying, and I'd go one step further and say that we as a nation ought to be
> doing more about that.

 _Ad nauseam_. You could call it E-lies-a.

/snark

~~~
nicky0
I beleive this is a critical issue and one we should be having a broad
national debate about.

------
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.

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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.

~~~
socmag
Yes it is quite laudable how transparent they are about being cheap SOB's

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ge96
Limited to students only?

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mkagenius
I guess they wont be sharing the dataset of actual alexa searches so far.

~~~
learningman
Geez, I hope not. Remember the disaster when AOL Research thought releasing
search history was a good idea?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak)

------
pamelabuck
Come on, $500K is a pittance to the winner which could create a compelling new
use case for Alexa. Amzn, you can do better and dont be penny wise, pound
foolish

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mintplant
They keep using the word "socialbot". I've read through the FAQ and I still
only have a vague idea of what they have in mind.

