The actual required work by the winning teams was a relatively small amount of software and computation, guided (I think) by a relatively small amount of manual examination. This seems more of a triumph of GPU progress and pretrained vision transformers making difficult problems suddenly easy than a generally applicable system. Given that progress, just releasing the data and letting people work on it without the monetary prize or competition restrictions would’ve worked too—given the same amount of publicity, at least, but I don’t think the argument here is “prizes are good because they can be an efficient way to get media attention”.
There’s been a significant amount of research on the relative merits of prizes, patents, and research funding, and the general conclusion has been that prizes aren’t usually that great.
The actual required work by the winning teams was a relatively small amount of software and computation, guided (I think) by a relatively small amount of manual examination. This seems more of a triumph of GPU progress and pretrained vision transformers making difficult problems suddenly easy than a generally applicable system. Given that progress, just releasing the data and letting people work on it without the monetary prize or competition restrictions would’ve worked too—given the same amount of publicity, at least, but I don’t think the argument here is “prizes are good because they can be an efficient way to get media attention”.
There’s been a significant amount of research on the relative merits of prizes, patents, and research funding, and the general conclusion has been that prizes aren’t usually that great.
One big prize, or many small prizes like here?