Palmer Luckey: Autonomous Weapons Are Ancient and Why Anduril Won't Build Humanoids | Moonshots Live | EP #295

Palmer Luckey (0:05)

Wow, it's so much brighter out here.

Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross (0:06)

It is.

Peter Diamandis (0:07)

It's, you know, the future is bright.

Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross (0:10)

There's lens flare in the future.

Peter Diamandis (0:12)

Yeah. So, welcome, everybody, to the Oscars of Optimism that, of course, we're opening up the summit with the king of autonomous weapon systems.

All right. So, I want to start with the fact that we're awarding three XPRIZES this week. Palmer, congratulations for winning our Wildfire XPRIZE.

Palmer Luckey (0:39)

Thank you so much.

Peter Diamandis (0:40)

Yeah.

Palmer Luckey (0:42)

This one's been a long time in the works.

Peter Diamandis (0:45)

Let's get the slide up here. So Palmer won $2.2 million for Anduril. As if you needed it. A million of that from Lockheed, which was kind of interesting.

Palmer Luckey (1:00)

We do a lot of work with Lockheed. We also compete with them, but in the defense space, we compete with their fighter jet division, we partner with them on some of their payloads, and so we do a lot of stuff together. But me and you have both been trying to get those autonomous firefighting stuff going for a long time.

Peter Diamandis (1:15)

For a while.

Palmer Luckey (1:16)

I mean, you got this prize announced back in 2019

It's been a long time. Anduril's, one of our first two products was an autonomous firefighting tank that we started building in 2017, finished in 2019

Peter Diamandis (1:28)

It's insane that we let fires become conflagrations before you put them out.

Palmer Luckey (1:32)

And it's kind of insane that people are saying, oh, the technology is finally made as possible. And I'm not going to correct him too often in public, but it's been possible for over a decade. It's just that it's become politically impossible to ignore the problem now.

Peter Diamandis (1:49)

I'm going to watch a one minute video clip of what your team achieved and if you'd walk us through it here.

Palmer Luckey (1:56)

Sure.

This was an example of what we were doing at the test site where we were detecting fires, classifying fires. What you don't really see in here is that you also need to reject fires. That was part of the test as well. So you have to know who's the guy smoking a cigarette, who's the guy, what's a campfire, what's a road flare, and then what's something that shows the characteristics of real fire. That's what you need to flag to people. That's what you need to flag to emergency services. And then you need to match make the type of fire to the right asset that's in the area. And so you want to basically use the most cost effective thing that can respond and get there in time. And if something is growing faster, you might need something different. If it's in woods versus on a brush hill, you might need something different. And so it's about detection, classification, rejection, match making, and then going and hitting the target. And the last thing I'll say is that with most of what we do, our work with the military, you go through many of these same steps. But if you find a target, let's say it takes you an hour to get to somebody versus 10 minutes, it usually doesn't make as much of a difference. When you're talking about fire, though, the difference between 10 minutes and an hour response, totally different tools you're going to need to respond with.

A bomb is a bomb whether or not it takes a day or an hour or a minute to get there. But when a fire is metastasizing, you need to pick the right thing that can put it out before it gets too large.

Peter Diamandis (3:32)

We're going to be announcing something in a month's time, that you're funding a new XPRIZE, and it's going to be secret until then, but we're going to tease it now.

Another $10 million prize. Would you share with us what we're going to do?

Palmer Luckey (3:50)

Sure.

We should keep the details secret, because there's some good twists, but suffice to say that I'm not interested in joining the race to push AI forward with my money. I think that the artificial intelligence side of models is pretty well covered by plenty of people. I think we've not been doing enough understanding biological intelligence, particularly beyond people, and so this is going to be a prize around understanding how animals think and making so that we can communicate with them 10 times better than the current state of the art for the current smartest species, and not just trained animals, but wild animals in their own language.