Enzi Prize: Oji Udezue Puts $10m Toward Cheaper AI

In Short

Oji Udezue says the $10 million Enzi Prize is meant to reduce the cost of frontier AI and support AI that better fits African languages and contexts.

What Happened

Oji Udezue introduced the Enzi Prize at Moonshot’s Emerging Tech stage and framed it around a basic question: who technology is actually for.

He argued that frontier AI is priced out of reach for most of the African continent. Frontier AI refers to the most advanced AI models, the kind that can generate text and answer questions, but often require large computing budgets to run.

Udezue said the Enzi Prize is his attempt to change who can afford to use these systems. “It’s for the person in your village who’s not educated,” he said. “Otherwise, we would be the most selfish generation that ever existed.”

He also cited a cost benchmark to explain the problem. Running a frontier, “Fable-class” model costs roughly $50 per million tokens, tokens are small chunks of text that AI models process.

Udezue’s background includes roles as chief product officer at Typeform and Calendly, product lead at Twitter, and head of product at Atlassian.

Why It Matters

If frontier AI stays expensive, many people and organisations in Africa may not be able to use it in everyday settings.

Udezue said the Enzi Prize is aimed at making frontier AI cheaper and more relevant to African languages and contexts, which could affect what kinds of AI products can be built and who they reach.