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The Alexa Prize
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- TY 10y agoI'm curious why only students can apply? Why not allow individual developers or companies as well?
- crooked-v 10y agoBecause Amazon wants good PR and university pipelines for promising future employees, not subsidized contractors.
- socmag 10y agoChurn and Burn
- gdulli 10y agoThink about what Amazon's turnover must be compared to other companies'.
- deanCommie 10y agoApparently, the Median Amazon tenure was only 0.1 years shorter than Google's in 2013: http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-ranked-by-turnover-rates-2013-7?IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-ranked-by-turnover-...
- hunterwerlla 10y agoAlthough 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.
- vkou 10y agoTenure is not turn-over. If you double the size of your company every year, but nobody quits, then your average tenure is <1 year. Nobody would be able to accuse you of having high turn-over, though. 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.
- oh_sigh 10y agoAmazon thrives on new grads. Get a bunch, work them to the brink for 2 years, only the "strong" survive to become senior, repeat forever.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- notyourwork 10y agoI 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 10y agoIsn'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 10y agoThe 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.
- drcross 10y agoBy exploited you mean release to the public domain. Big difference.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoMy 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.
- sigmar 10y agoThe 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 10y agoSo if you have something capable of winning this prize, how much more would it be worth to keep it?
- softawre 10y agoOf course, it depends. How well can you market/sell it? How much is winning this prize worth to you in future job earnings?
- toomuchtodo 10y agoWhatever 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 10y agoWhat about Mycroft? https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/
- mkagenius 10y agoI guess they wont be sharing the dataset of actual alexa searches so far.
- learningman 10y agoGeez, 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
- ChartsNGraffs 10y agoI didn't know the Turing Test was renamed to Alexa Prize
- gavinpc 10y agoIf 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 10y agoI beleive this is a critical issue and one we should be having a broad national debate about.
- Houshalter 10y agoFrom 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.
- taneq 10y agoOoh, so they expect the bots to fail a Turing Test because they're superhuman? That makes it easier. /s
- Houshalter 10y agoNo they didn't say that. A socialbot should fail a Turing test because no human could Google an answer in 1 second or know the exact temperature, etc.
- CGamesPlay 10y agoIs 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?
- espadrine 10y agoI 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.
- cheeze 10y agoIt's Amazon, what do you expect?
- skizm 10y agoBut, does Amazon pay the $500k even if the winner doesn't actually beat current state of the art? Seems like you just have to beat out the other competitors.
- jt2190 10y ago> 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.
- muzster 10y agothat'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.
- 10y ago
- ge96 10y agoLimited to students only?
- partycoder 10y agoIf 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.
- perryh2 10y agoIt'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.
- iandanforth 10y agoAmazon 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 10y agoYup, 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-invested-35-million-into-a-smart-thermostat-2016-9 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.
- bambax 10y agoWow, that's pretty bad.
- HNSucksAss 10y agoNot to mention, they inexplicably named their Siri clone after a camera.
- daveguy 10y ago
- alexmlamb2 10y agoEveryone 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 10y agoYes it is quite laudable how transparent they are about being cheap SOB's
- mintplant 10y agoThey 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.
- pamelabuck 10y agoCome 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