TED curator Chris Anderson just announced the world’s biggest speaking fee — a $4.5m (£3.1m) cheque to be awarded to a speaker at the 2020 TED conference. There’s just one catch: the speaker must be an artificial intelligence, which convinces the audience that it has mastered the art of the 18-minute TED talk.
The IBM Watson AI X Prize, announced on Wednesday at the TED conference in Vancouver, will offer $4.5 million to the team that develops an artificial intelligence showing “how humans can collaborate with powerful cognitive technologies to tackle some of the world’s grand challenges”.
Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation, said the winner would be chosen by the TED audience in 2020, when three finalists — either AIs or AI human partnerships — “come on stage to deliver jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring TED talks”.