Thank you to all those who have submitted proposals to the ELK proposal competition. We have evaluated all proposals submitted before January 14th[1]. Decisions are still being made on proposals submitted after January 14th.

The deadline for submissions is February 15th, after which we will release summaries of the proposals and associated counterexamples.

We evaluated 30 distinct proposals from 25 people. We awarded a total of $70,000 for proposals from the following 8 people:

  • $20,000 for a proposal from Sam Marks
  • $10,000 for a proposal from Dmitrii Krasheninnikov
  • $5,000 for a proposal from Maria Shakhova
  • $10,000 for proposals from P, who asked to remain anonymous
  • $10,000 for a proposal from Scott Viteri
  • $5,000 for a proposal from Jacob Hilton and Holly Mandel
  • $10,000 for a proposal from Jacob Hilton

We would have also awarded $15,000 for proposals from Holden Karnofsky, however he is on ARC’s board and is ineligible to receive the prize.


  1. We don’t plan on spending time evaluating and awarding proposals made after February 15th but feel free to email elk@alignmentresearchcenter.org in the future if you think you have a promising proposal, and we might consider it for a prize. ↩︎

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1 comment, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 12:36 PM

Congratulations to all the new winners!

This seems like a good time to mention that, after I was awarded a retroactive prize alongside the announcement of this contest, I estimated I’d have been about half as likely to have generated my idea without having read an earlier comment by Scott Viteri, so based on Shapley value I suggested reallocating 25% of my prize to Scott, which I believe ARC did. I’m delighted to see Scott also getting a prize for a full proposal.

I’m excited for the new proposals and counterexamples to be published so that we can all continue to build on each others’ ideas in the open.