LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 17 January 2017 — The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is a $5 million AI and cognitive computing competition, challenging teams globally to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful AI technologies to tackle the world’s grand challenges. The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is a four-year competition with annual milestone competitions in 2017 and 2018. The top three finalists will compete for the Grand Prize at TED 2020.
The prize aims to accelerate adoption of AI technologies and spark creative, innovative, and audacious demonstrations of the technology that are truly scalable and solve societal grand challenges. The solutions will contribute to the enrichment of available tools and data sets for the usage of innovators everywhere. The goal is also to accelerate the understanding and adoption of AI’s most promising breakthroughs.
To encourage innovation in any form, the competition is an open challenge in AI. Rather than set a single, universal goal for all teams, this competition will invite teams to each create their own goal and solution to a grand challenge.
Prize levels include the $3,000,000 Grand Prize, $1,000,000 2nd Place, and $500,000 3rd Place. Purses will be awarded at the end of competition at TED 2020, for a total of $4.5 million. Two Milestone Competition prize purses will be awarded in 2017 and 2018 by the Judges to recognize special accomplishments. A total of $500,000 will be available for these prizes.
Nine prominent members serve on the AI XPRIZE Advisory Board, including IEEE, NASA, Google, and Carnegie Mellon University to name a few. The primary responsibility of the Board is to advise XPRIZE regarding all aspects of the design, judging criteria and implementation of the competition.
