Superlinear Prizes

Superlinear is a prize competition platform created as an experiment by Nonlinear, an AI safety nonprofit co-founded in 2021 by Kat Woods and Emerson Spartz. Drew Spartz, who joined Nonlinear full-time in April 2022, is credited as the founder of Superlinear specifically. The platform operates on the theory that prize competitions are a highly effective and underutilized mechanism for mobilizing talent toward important problems. It cites historical precedents such as the Millennium Prize Problems, crypto bug bounties, and the Netflix Prize as evidence that well-structured financial incentives can attract significant effort from high-quality contributors. The core mechanism is what the platform calls "nerd sniping": combining an interesting problem with a monetary prize to attract capable solvers. Superlinear sought to decentralize prize creation in a manner analogous to how FTX's regrantor program decentralized grantmaking. The platform offered up to $50,000 to community members who could generate prize ideas and fund them as "Superlinear regrantors," with the possibility that other funders could top up prize pools for ideas they found compelling. Notable prizes on the platform included the Truman Prize (a $100,000 pool recognizing EAs who declined credit to increase their impact), the Most Important Century writing prize ($500 per qualifying submission engaging with Holden Karnofsky's writing series), and various AI alignment bounties. The total prize fund available through the platform was described as approximately $500,000. Nonlinear, the parent organization, received approximately $600,000 from the Survival and Flourishing Fund and $250,000 from the Future Fund. The Superlinear team included platform developer and community manager plex, prize developer Nathan Young (head of forecasting at Zeitgeist), and intern Luca De Leo. As of the time of this research, the Superlinear website displays a hiatus notice stating that all prizes are paused with no announced return date. Visitors are encouraged to subscribe to a newsletter for future updates.

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