If you're in the US, consider small claims court. It's a small sum of money, you won't need to pay a lawyer, they'll probably not even show up.
I only submitted before Nov 1st, so I'm not sure to what extent I was personally conned.
(Actually, I don't know whom they'd send -- I think, for small claims court, they have to send a paralegal rather than a lawyer.)
It's a classic scam: make a job post for freelancers, ask for a "work sample" or "take-home project," then have a few dozen applicants do the actual task you need them to do as their sample, then reject everybody.
The goal was to involve experts from a wide range of fields and disciplines in the development of frontier AI — especially people who might not normally have the chance to participate in this industry. To that end, we consider the contest a great success.
I’m happy to report that we received tens of thousands of submissions, many of them highly competitive. Our participants really rose to the occasion. It’s true that we extended a grace period for submissions, and the intention here was to make the project accessible to the broadest possible group of people. At the same time, the reality is that the vast majority of our prize-winners submitted their questions within the initial deadline.
We appreciate your contributions to Humanity’s Last Exam, and we hope you’ll take pride in your efforts to push this fledgling technology forward.
Successful questions would be interpreted as being included in the dataset corresponding to the public publication of the benchmark and results. "Have a chance" would be interpreted as "have a non-zero probability".
Essentially, the press release promised that contributors of "successful questions" would be coauthors on the dataset paper and have a chance to win from a $500,000 prize pool. Excluding questions deemed "successful" because they were submitted after a deadline—when the terms did not clearly disqualify them and all public communication in fact encouraged them to submit—violates the implied agreement and would constitute bad faith, misrepresentation, and breach of contract.
Near the deadline, I counted the total number of submissions, and realized that each question I wrote had an expected value of hundreds of dollars, which is a great use of my time. So I wrote a good number, using the knowledge gained in my CS Ph. D.
Then, as the Nov 1st deadline rolled around, they announced they extended the deadline to Nov 15th. Then Nov 15th came, and it said on their website they were still accepting submissions.
Most of my submissions are being included in the benchmark, but I'm only getting paid $500, for one of them (the one I thought was most standard and least difficult, funnily enough). Had they closed submissions when they said they would, it seems likely I'd be paid for a few more.
From my perspective, they basically conned hundreds of Ph. D.'s around the world to write questions for much less reward than promised. My close friend wrote a large number of questions for them, is getting paid thousands of dollars, and still feels defrauded.
I'm not sure what they're doing in the end. It sounds like they're mostly just paying people who submitted before Nov 1st with a few exceptions, but either way they lied. There was no indication that people who submitted later would not get paid, and there was no indication that the deadline would be extended. Either they pay people who submitted after Nov 1st, meaning they lied to the people who submitted before about their expected reward. Or they don't, meaning they majorly lied to the people who submitted after. Either way, it's clear grounds for a class action lawsuit, and I hope one gets running.