**Submissions for the AI Progress Essay Contest will close Saturday, April 16th.**

### Contest Announcement

We're excited to open the [AI Progress Essay Contest](https://www.metaculus.com/project/ai-fortified-essay-contest/), which seeks to refine our predictions about transformative AI: the pathways that lead to it, the timelines we might expect, and its impact upon arrival. 

You can contribute to better preparation for such a future by submitting an essay that grapples with one of a variety of challenging, highly significant questions, such as: 

* Will scaling up compute be sufficient for human-level performance on important domains like language modeling and computer vision?
* Can we map disagreements between figures in AI risk—such as the [Late 2021 MIRI Conversations](https://intelligence.org/late-2021-miri-conversations/)—onto disagreements on specific quantifiable predictions? 
* Is deep learning sufficient for achieving transformative AI?

This contest, part of our Forecasting AI Progress initiative, will end on April 16th, after which the best essays will be published and awarded the Dreyfus Prize, which features a prize pool of $6,500. 

We see Fortified Essays as providing an opportunity for the Metaculus Community to bring all of the skill and insight applied during forecasting to a different task—one that's better able to make the reasoning that goes into forecasting more explicit, the quantities more contextualized, and the outputs more actionable. We look forward to your essays!