Enzi Prize Aims to Bring Down AI Costs for Africa

Oji Udezue, a former executive at Typeform, Calendly, and Twitter, has launched the Enzi Prize to address the high cost of frontier AI in Africa. He argues that current prices, around $50 per million tokens, are out of reach for most of the continent. The prize aims to bring this cost down to $5 or lower.

The Enzi Prize Foundation, a Delaware non-profit, is offering a $10 million prize purse as part of a $14 million initiative. Entries must meet a minimum standard before competing on cost, and winners retain their intellectual property but must publish an open, royalty-free version for use in Africa and the Global South.

The model is based on the Ansari X-Prize, which offers a reward for a desired breakthrough and lets competition draw in investment to achieve it. Udezue estimates that winning the prize could take three to six years and has already seen a positive response from a $20,000 pilot.