Recently, the Internet has been overwhelmed by hysteria and general panic about the gloomy future that awaits us all if artificial intelligence suddenly develops to a level where humanity becomes a burden to it. Is it really as bad as we were told in the films "A Space Odyssey 2001" and "Terminator"? The organizers of the XPRIZE Foundation for the Support of Revolutionary Innovations do not think so, which is why they organized a competition to identify the most useful and most friendly artificial intelligence for people.
XPRIZE Foundation was founded in 1995 by American businessman Peter Diamandis. The fund receives financial resources for the existence and support of projects from individuals, as well as large corporations like Google. The main slogan of XPRIZE is: "Make the impossible possible." Among the projects of the fund are, for example, Google Lunar XPRIZE, in which a private company that sent its lunar rover to the moon, capable of traveling at least 500 meters on its surface and return photographs to Earth, will receive a prize of $ 20 million. Another project implies that a $ 10 million prize will be awarded to a private group of scientists who proposed a method for decoding 100 human genomes in no more than 10 days and at a cost of this decoding of no more than $ 10,000 per genome.
The new project of the foundation is called AI XPRIZE and, as you already understand, aims to create a unique artificial intelligence capable of solving the global problems of mankind. Initially, the best AI development teams will be selected to participate in the competition, then each team will have to choose for themselves some global problem, the solution of which their artificial intelligence will have to look for. This could be, for example, finding a cure for cancer, a recipe for "world peace" or a way to stop global warming.
Over the next three years, the participating teams will work on their projects and meet once a year at the IBM World of Watson conference to report on their achievements to the committee. At the end of three years, three of the best will be selected from all participants, who will compete for the main prize of $ 5 million. The winner will be awarded during the TED2020 conference, which, as you already understood, will happen in 2020. The rest of the details about the upcoming competition will be announced in May this year at the World of Watson conference.