I think the Korean government did have a competition like this, I remember last year we got a bunch of models released at the same time to make the cut for the next stage. The models weren't anything to write home about, IMO.

Having it with clear hw requirements tiers is a nice differentiator. The only issue is that the benchmarks would 100% need to be closed, no other way around it. And then you have the issue of creating and curating good evals for every "stage" of the project. That's a hard task even for "honest" lab-internal evals. And you'd have to publish those evals after each round (for trust purposes), and start over for the next round. Doable, but it would cost a lot (probably more than the prize pools) and you'd have to keep doing this.

It was a competition organized by the Korean government but the directive wasn't for the same cause as the writer. It was more for constructing Sovereign AI for the country. Also, all models except Exaone had some weights copied from Chinese models, and from the corporate point of view, developing from-scratch model is not cheap despite the financial support from the government.

Yes, I hope the open model communities will someday be able to run current frontier models which will be able to handle autonomous tasks and the hardware to run it will be served at consumer level; however, like how recycling isn't profitable, no companies will fully commit to the movement. Don't get it twisted, I don't have a solution but maybe a global scale movement to liberate knowledge-library could suffice.

Yeah, I suspect the $200K check would be the cheapest line item in the whole thing