Neal Stephenson is one of the judges. 40k seems like generous enough first prize. I wonder if they will accept a play.
We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it.
(Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a very generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita annual income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_... )
Exactly. Not sure it will stop the inevitable torrent of slop, but it's generous enough that I think enough serious people will take it seriously that something interesting can float to the top. Can't wait to read (maybe write).
How are you going to evaluate 10^6 submissions? Let me guess: You'll preselect with AI for the expedient narrative:
"AI will be democratized and a small model will run on any GPU and there will be no oligarchies and China will pay for all of it!"
And 40K is enough for this to be taken seriously for producing 1000-5000 words.