The Xprize foundation has whittled its latest competition down from 10,000 sign ups to 147 teams in its first-ever "open" competition. Announced in June of last year, the IBM Watson AI Xprize is the first not to identify a specific problem. Rather, teams are asked to define their own issue and address it using artificial intelligence. "Unlike other prizes that have a very specific end-point in mind, we're asking teams to be more free, in terms of the problems they'll be solving," competition leader Amir Banifatemi told TechCrunch in a conversation this week. "Because AI is involved in everything, we're asking teams to frame the problems that are grand challenges, and use those grand challenges as a backdrop and try to come up with a solution address them."