ELK First Round Contest Winners
Thank you to all those who have submitted proposals to the ELK proposal competition. We have evaluated all proposals submitted before January 14th[1]. Decisions are still being made on proposals submitted after January 14th.
The deadline for submissions is February 15th, after which we will release summaries of the proposals and associated counterexamples.
We evaluated 30 distinct proposals from 25 people. We awarded a total of $70,000 for proposals from the following 8 people:
$20,000 for a proposal from Sam Marks
$10,000 for a proposal from Dmitrii Krasheninnikov
$5,000 for a proposal from Maria Shakhova
$10,000 for proposals from P, who asked to remain anonymous
$10,000 for a proposal from Scott Viteri
$5,000 for a proposal from Jacob Hilton and Holly Mandel
$10,000 for a proposal from Jacob Hilton
We would have also awarded $15,000 for proposals from Holden Karnofsky, however he is on ARC’s board and is ineligible to receive the prize.
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We don’t plan on spending time evaluating and awarding proposals made after February 15th but feel free to email elk@alignmentresearchcenter.org in the future if you think you have a promising proposal, and we might consider it for a prize.
Congratulations to all the new winners!
This seems like a good time to mention that, after I was awarded a retroactive prize alongside the announcement of this contest, I estimated I’d have been about half as likely to have generated my idea without having read an earlier comment by Scott Viteri, so based on Shapley value I suggested reallocating 25% of my prize to Scott, which I believe ARC did. I’m delighted to see Scott also getting a prize for a full proposal.
I’m excited for the new proposals and counterexamples to be published so that we can all continue to build on each others’ ideas in the open.
Thanks Davidad!
Are these proposals on the Alignment Forum or publicly available somewhere? Would be interested in reading them. Or are they meant to be kept private?
I had read the OP too quickly. Re-reading it I found this part which answers the question:
Really pleased to see that so many good proposals have come in! And kudos to unselected applicants for taking on the challenge as well.
And thanks to ARC for the contest. I’ve just spent a lot of time fumbling down (what seem to be) blind alleys, which may or may not say something about my fitness for the field, but I’ve also gotten my head around a few basics of modern ML in the process.
I hope the contest is achieving its goals for ARC too.
Nice work everyone! Very excited to see the results.