Technical Prize Director, Energy Efficient AI - XPRIZE Foundation

XPRIZE Overview

XPRIZE is an established global leader in designing and executing large-scale competitions to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. As a 501(c)3, our unique model democratizes innovation by incentivizing crowd-sourced, scientifically viable solutions to create a more equitable and abundant future for all. Since our founding in 1994, we’ve launched $519 million in prize competitions that are driving more than $31 billion in social and economic impact — a 60x return on philanthropic investment. These competitions not only de-risk early-stage breakthrough ideas but also mobilize capital, talent, and momentum to accelerate solutions from concept to real-world scale.

We operate across 5 areas of impact,including:

• Deep Technology + Exploration
• Energy + Climate + Nature
• Food + Water + Waste
• Health
• Learning + Society

Join XPRIZE to help create meaningful impact as we strive to empower humanity to achieve breakthroughs and architect a more equitable and abundant future for all.

Position Description

The XPRIZE Foundation is seeking a leader for the Energy Efficient AI Prize, an ambitious upcoming global competition designed to accelerate breakthroughs in dramatically reducing the energy intensity and carbon footprint of artificial intelligence infrastructure and computation.

As AI scales to solve humanity’s greatest challenges, its underlying infrastructure is driving an unsustainable exponential curve in global power demand. Data center energy needs could consume a significant portion of globally generated electricity within the coming decades if current trends continue. The goal of this prize is to decouple the advancement of AI from massive carbon footprints and grid-destabilizing power consumption.

The Energy Efficient AI XPRIZE is a 12-15 month global competition designed to demonstrate a 10x reduction in the energy consumption required for AI inference (i.e., “Less watts per correct thought”). Another way to look at this goal is 10x greater “cognitive efficiency” per unit power. The Prize is method agnostic; it aims to catalyze innovations across AI model efficiency, compute optimization, cooling systems, hardware acceleration, data center architecture, software optimization, energy-aware training and inference, and other transformative approaches. Claims of 10X or greater energy-efficiency will be measured against a baseline that represents today’s state-of-the-art methods, with a 500M-1B parameter open-source model and commercial-off-the-shelf hardware.

The Technical Prize Director, reporting to the Domain Lead, is a deep subject matter expert in AI infrastructure, model deployment and testing, and is responsible for the overall operations and management of the Prize competition, including coordination of operations, team relations, marketing, contract negotiations, partnerships, technical validation