Why not invest that directly in various different prototyped technologies already being developed for this _now_ to accelerate the process?
It feels like offering free swimming floats to the first one who can swim out to get them.
It feels like offering free swimming floats to the first one who can swim out to get them.
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.
I just wish it was tiered such that proper seed money backs various alternatives and the best proven tech (not just the first) gets a big boost when attempting to scale.
But not my millions to spend so I just hope it had a good impact.