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Re:GPU World by tucnak on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @01:18AM (#49518236)
Neal Stephenson is one of the judges. 40k seems like generous enough first prize. I wonder if they will accept a play.
Re:GPU World by gwern on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @01:35AM (#49518327)
> 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_... )

Re:GPU World by avaer on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @01:39AM (#49518350)
> $40k is a _very_ generous prize for a short piece of writing

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).

Re:GPU World by 2ajshg17 on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @10:07AM (#49522220)
Of course. Ex Sequoia members and crypto bros are generous.

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!"

Re:GPU World by avaer on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @01:25AM (#49518272)
Also gwern and Matt Huang. Seems a pretty interesting committee.

And 40K is enough for this to be taken seriously for producing 1000-5000 words.