Researcher launches $20,000 essay contest to find AI research collaborator — deadline May 10th

Dwarkesh Patel announced a blog prize offering $10,000 (1st place), $6,000 (2nd), and $4,000 (3rd) for essays up to 1,000 words answering one of four open questions about AI's future: why progress hasn't slowed despite earlier predictions, how AI companies will become profitable, how to deploy hundreds of billions in philanthropic AI funding effectively, and what non-AI-producing countries should do now to avoid being sidelined.

The contest explicitly targets people who can synthesize technical arguments across multiple domains and identify the crucial factor in complex, ambiguous questions — something Patel found LLMs do poorly because they list 5 plausible answers without the judgment to distinguish which matters most.

The real goal is to hire a full-time research collaborator in San Francisco (or remote) to help shift Patel's podcast and blog from asking important AI questions to actually answering them — exploring dozens of sub-questions and sharpening arguments that could inform major economic policy, foreign policy decisions, and how superintelligences get trained and governed.