Bill Gates is funding a $1mn competition to spur the use of artificial intelligence to find innovative treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, the latest effort to deploy the promising technology to find cures for humanity’s toughest illnesses.

The Alzheimer’s Insights AI prize will be awarded to the team that comes up with the most original way to program AI-powered agents that are “capable of independent planning, reasoning, and action to accelerate breakthrough discoveries from existing Alzheimer’s data”.  

The winning tool will be released for free on the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative’s cloud “workbench” to be used by scientists globally, the organisation said on Tuesday. The prize is being financed by Gates Ventures, the family office of the billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder.