Lab Leaks, Black Holes, and Eggs: Epistemic Case Study Competition

FLF is running a competition to find the best workflows and methodologies for using AI to produce reliable, trustworthy knowledge bases, grounded in real-world cases. We’re open-minded on the types of submissions we receive and on how they address the problem. We’ve set aside approximately $200k for prizes. Winning submissions may receive a prize from $5k-$50k and if submissions warrant, multiple $50k prizes are possible. Winners may be offered opportunities for further funded work.You can express interest right away to receive commentary, information, and updates — whether you’d like to participate or are just interested in the outcomes of the competition.The heights of human epistemic investigation are impressive and valuable, but rare and difficult to reach — see our abridged collection of strong examples.[1] The limiting factor is rarely exquisite insight (though this helps!), and more often diligence, a curious and open mindset, and the time and effort needed to do the thorough work investigating background on a topic: activities AI is well placed to assist with.Existing AI-assisted knowledge base work demonstrates real pieces of this — agent memory (e.g., Claude Code's memory and skills), LLM-curated personal wikis (Karpathy's perhaps the highest-profile), and deep-research tools. But these mostly produce single-user artifacts tuned to one investigator's context, not the kind that travel, combine, or survive (especially adversarial) scrutiny.We’re particularly excited by the compounding potential — if structured analyses[2] become reusable, refineable artifacts, every serious investigation enables future work, on the same or related topics, and by the same or different people, to reach further from a more solid epistemic foundation. Who knows, you might even solve debate!This competition provides three challenging case studies — with deliberately varied challenge profiles — and invites you to produce tooling and techniques to help people navigate them. First,