Prometheus Science Bowl Inc

In the summer of 2022, Prometheus organized ELK, a contest encouraging primarily high schoolers and college students to learn about the field of AI alignment and the problem of Eliciting Latent Knowledge. The contest was modeled after a successful contest of the same name recently organized by the Alignment Research Center, or ARC. The problem participants were intended to solve occurs when artificial intelligence optimizes for outputs matching what a human would put out, rather than producing what it actually knows according to a certain metric. For the contest, participants submitted proposals for new strategies that could solve this problem or extending previous strategies to cover counterexamples that had been posed to contradict them. At the beginning of the competition period, Prometheus provided various documents with instructions and technical guidance for participants, and used various methods to conduct outreach for participants. Prometheus received nine submissions for the contest, seven of which received prizes ranging from $500 to $5,000 per participant for a total prize pool of $25,000.

At the end of 2022, Prometheus began organizing Ignis, a series of online and in-person science bowl tournaments run on a single set of questions. These tournaments were eventually held in northern California, Texas, New York, and Wisconsin, with planned but failed tournaments in Maryland and southern California. With 142 teams from across the country, this was the largest science bowl effort ever outside of the National Science Bowl, an established organization run by the US Department of Energy that created the competition itself.