The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has launched a new prize that grants the winner £1 million every year for a decade for devising a solution that uses AI for public good.

Applications for the inaugural Manchester Prize, which will run from December 2023 to March 2025, is seeking innovation from UK-led teams with “breakthrough ideas” for overcoming challenges in the fields of energy, environment and infrastructure.

Up to 10 finalist teams will initially receive £100,000 each and access to free compute to develop their innovation with one finalist set to scoop the £1 million grand prize in early 2025.

The department suggests a winning solution could centre on innovations including reducing energy costs for consumers by using AI to model household energy use, reducing disruption to public services through predictive modelling of infrastructure resilience, or improving efficiency and reducing resource consumption in manufacturing by using AI to optimise or automate energy-intensive processes.

Prize entrants are advised to create solutions that demonstrate advances in technical capabilities such as generalisation, uncertainty quantification, interpretability, data-efficient AI and physics-based AI, noting that winners will be judged according to the criteria of innovation, impact, long-term viability, feasibility, and safety and ethics.

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