Why are we excited about bounties/prizes?

The nerd snipe formula: an interesting problem + a prize for solving it.

You’ll win $1m if you solve any of the seven Millennium Prize Problems. These problems nerd sniped a generation of math enthusiasts because the $1m prize says “this is an important problem!”

How successful have they been? One estimate is that ~100,000 people spent 10 hours trying to solve P=NP - that’s like 500 full-time PhD-level employees working for an entire year.

More examples: ELK, FLI Worldbuilding, Netflix Prize, crypto protocols pay out $2m-10m bug bounties (Gitcoin, Immunefi).

There are thousands of smart people in adjacent fields (e.g. ML/CS/STEM types) who could be working with us overnight if we nerd sniped them with the right prize problems. Prizes are how we get them excited to spend their nights and weekends working on x-risk.

Prizes are scalable: orgs are bottlenecked by hiring and management, but prizes are only bottlenecked by imagination.

How big could this get?

How many hours have been spent to date on AI alignment? Could we 100x that number with a big prize? Holden indicated he might be interested in funding a $1 billion prize for alignment. A $1 billion prize would be the biggest scientific prize of all time. It could boost the prestige of the field significantly because it’s a truly costly signal. If this is the most important problem in the world, shouldn’t it have the biggest prize?

What’s the P=NP, the Reimann hypothesis, or the Poincare conjecture of alignment? We don’t know, but maybe we can put out bounties for anybody who can specify the $1b problem well enough to be bounty-able. Maybe we organize “prize hackathons” to generate ideas, etc.