The Alexa Prize
developer.amazon.com
developer.amazon.com
"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!
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...
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.
This is a better than most employee deals where the employee has no rights to the developed tech. Even most contract work gives the company exclusive rights as a "work for hire".
It's more like an MIT license between the developer and Amazon rather than a proprietary license just for Amazon.
> 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.
>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.
They're not paying for a startup with developed tech, established PhD researchers, and a business plan; they're paying students to do research for a year. Assuming a team of 5, $100K/year is very competitive in the academic world unless the students are at the stage of their career where Google recruiters are calling them every day. The likely result of this is something that will have interesting results and maybe a nice demo but will need further refinement in the industry apparatus in order to reach the market.
>> 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.
Indeed, this definitely points to the larger imbalance in academic research finance. My university takes a huge proportion of the grant money that faculty win, and reduces aid for graduate students if they independently acquire outside scholarship money.
I'm fairly sure there are going to be more than three entrants.
I'm still reading through the competition rules, but it's not clear to me if the winners lose their intellectual property rights. In some past tech competitions I've seen the winners still got to keep their product, the point of the competition was just to get people interested in the domain.
>AI startups are sold way more these days; Amazon would benefit tremendously from a novel technique in that domain.
Are they really though? I've been experimenting for a little bit with neural nets for chatbots. It's always been an interest of mine. I never thought it would have much economic value or interest until now.
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.
> 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.
This really is a cheap win... for Amazon.
>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.
Interesting, seems like they could publish your source under whatever license they chose. It might be in their interest to use a BSD/GPL/MIT license to continue community contribution. Though it might hurt your ability to turn that software into a Conversational-AI-aaS business.
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.
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.
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.
I hope Amazon receives great submissions from this!
This competition is about producing a SocialBot that Amazon will exploit.
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.
> 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
>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.
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.