Offering a prize could potentially result in more than the prize value ($100M) being invested into those very technologies. As an example, we can look at the N

Offering a prize could potentially result in more than the prize value ($100M) being invested into those very technologies. As an example, we can look at the Netflix Prize [1], which was only $1M. But that $1M bought them way, way more than $1M worth of work: "over 20,000 teams had registered for the competition from over 150 countries. 2,000 teams had submitted over 13,000 prediction sets." It's hard to guess the value of having 20,000 teams working on the Netflix problem, but $1M invested directly by Netflix would probably only pay for 3-4 engineers for 1 year, so it seems like they got a lot of leverage out of that $1M. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize