Given that pharma is a massive industry and that drug discovery often costs around 1 billion dollars, the top prize of $22,000 seems awfully low. Will we start to see larger prizes, or will startups take this technology and monetize better than academia currently does?
With Geoffrey Hinton involved as a supervisor I expect they were on the bleeding edge for other reasons anyway and just decided to scoop up some extra cash as well. I've not looked closely but Kaggle does seem to be a little like 99designs though.
