Announcement: AI alignment prize round 4 winners

Whose time do you mean? The judges? Your own time? The participants' time?

This and cousin_it's suggested novelty effect both make sense, but to me it just means that the prize givers got more than they bargained for in the first rounds and maybe it set people's expectations too high for what such a prize can accomplish. I failed to pay much attention to the first two rounds (should probably go back and look at them again) and to me the latter two rounds seem like a reasonable steady state result of the prize given the amount of money/prestige involved.

I wonder if another thing that discouraged people was a feeling that they had to compete with experienced professional researchers who already have funding from other sources. I think if I were to design a new prize with the experience of this one in mind, I'd split it into two prizes, one optimized for increasing prestige of the field, and one for funding people who otherwise couldn't get funding or to provide an alternative source of funding with better incentives. The former would look like conventional prestigious prizes in other fields, and the latter would run continuously and pay out as soon as some entry/nomination meets a certain subjective threshold of quality (which can be adjusted over time depending on the prize budget and quality of submissions), and the prize money would subtract out the amount of formal funding the recipient already received for the work (such as salaries, grants, or other prizes).

I agree with this point. Looking at the things that have won over time it eventually got to feel like it wasn't worth bothering to submit anything because the winners were going to end up mostly being folks who would have done their work anyway and meet certain levels of prestige. In this way I do sort of feel like the prize failed because it was set up in a way that rewarded work that would have happened anyway and failed to motivate work that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Maybe it's only in my mind that the value of a prize like this is to increase work on the margin rather than recognize outstanding work that would have otherwise been done, but I feel like beyond the first round it's been a prize of the form "here's money for the best stuff on AI alignment in the last x months" rather than "here's money to make AI alignment research happen that would otherwise not have happened". That made me much less interested in it, to the point I put the prize out of my mind until I saw this post reminding me of it today.

Could there be some kind of mentorship incentive? Another problem at large in alignment research seems to be lack of mentors, since most of the people skilled enough to fill this role are desperately working against the clock. A naïve solution could be to offer a smaller prize to the mentor of a newer researcher if the newbie's submission details a significant amount of help on their part. Obviously, dishonest people could throw the name of their friend on the submission because "why not", but I'm not sure how serious this would be.

What would be nice would be some incentive for high quality mentorship / for bringing new people into the contest and research field, in a way that encourages the mentors to get their friends in the contest, even though that might end up increasing the amount of competition they have for their own proposal.

This might also modestly improve social incentives for mentors, since people like being associated with success and being seen as helpful / altruistic.

ETA: What about a flat prize (a few thousand dollars) you can only win once, but thence can mentor others and receive a slightly more modest sum for prizes they win? It might help kickstart people’s alignment careers if sufficiently selective / give them the confidence to continue work. Have to worry about the details for what counts as mentorship, depending on how cheaty we think people would try to be.