The $10B Satellite Empire Putting AI in Orbit, Why Chips Beat Rockets & China's #1 Open Model | EP #266

**Peter Diamandis** (0:00)
Today, Planet's a $10 billion company. You've coined the term large Earth models. What's that mean?

**Will Marshall** (0:05)
A bit like Google indexed the internet to make it searchable. We're indexing the Earth to make it searchable. It will finally enable us to be smart stewards of our planet.

**Peter Diamandis** (0:15)
The elephant in the room here, Will, I have to ask it, is how do you compete with Elon's plans for orbital AI data centers?

**Will Marshall** (0:23)
Everyone, apart from SpaceX, has to pay the SpaceX launch tax right now. Everyone apart from Nvidia and Google has to pay the Nvidia tax. And which tax is more important? Near term is the launch, but longer term is the compute.

**Dave Blundin** (0:36)
That is fucking brilliant.

**Peter Diamandis** (0:38)
Our next story should keep the US labs up at night. It's a Chinese model called GLM 5.2. In some cases matches or exceeds the top models from OpenAI and from Anthropic.

**Dave Blundin** (0:51)
This level of performance in an open weight model is absolutely shocking. You can burn tokens to get more intelligence than the Chinese have figured out how to do it.

**Alexander Wissner-Gross** (0:59)
The Chinese are evidently figuring out how to more efficiently or at least more cheaply reason.

**Dave Blundin** (1:08)
Now that's the Moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

**Peter Diamandis** (1:13)
Welcome to Moonshots, everybody. I'm here with my magnificent Moonshot mates, Salim Ismail, the father of organizational singularities.
Salim, good to see you, pal.

**Salim Ismail** (1:23)
Good to be here. Good to be home.

**Peter Diamandis** (1:25)
Yeah, everybody's home. This is great. This is home day.

**Dave Blundin** (1:28)
When was the last time this happened? This is like never, never.

**Peter Diamandis** (1:31)
AWG, our in-house super genius. Good to see you, Alex.

**Alexander Wissner-Gross** (1:36)
I will say in my defense, coining the term planetarq for a quadrillionaire who can own an entire planet was not an advertisement for Will and Planet.

**Peter Diamandis** (1:45)
Yes.
Dave Blundin, our Wizard of AI Investing. I'm Peter Diamandis, your host and your optimism evangelist. We have a special guest here with us today, a friend of nearly 20 years, a man who's building humanity's orbital AI and data layer, Will Marshall, the CEO of Planet. Will.

**Will Marshall** (2:04)
Hey, thanks for having me, guys.

**Peter Diamandis** (2:06)
I have a question. Do people ever say you're the CEO of the planet?

**Will Marshall** (2:10)
I should be.

**Peter Diamandis** (2:11)
You should be.

**Dave Blundin** (2:14)
At FYI, Planet is a public company, ticker is PL. You can track it in real time as we speak today.

**Peter Diamandis** (2:19)
Yeah. As always, we got a packed WTF just happened in tech episode. The Singularity waits for no man and no agent.
We're going to kick off a discussion on Planet's push for large Earth models, their orbital AI cloud. We'll jump into Eric Schmidt's newest launch company, Relativity Space and their upcoming Mars mission. We'll jump there from the AI talent reshuffling and President Javier Millet's provocative statements on AI personhood. Of course, Alex, I expected you're the one influencing there, but we'll ask you behind the scenes.

**Alexander Wissner-Gross** (2:52)
You're saying, Peter, you think I'm pulling Javier Millet's strings for AI personhood?

**Peter Diamandis** (2:58)
I think you're influencing him.
We're going to close out with the shocking performance of China's open-weight GLM 5.2 model. Bydance's new 4K video model will wrap up with a collapsing price and exploding capex of intelligence that's going to be fueled by nuclear and fusion power plants. All right, let's jump in.
Will, I want to kick it off with you, buddy. I hope at the end of this conversation, everyone listening is going to understand what this layer of AI and data capabilities that you're building is going to mean for them. But let me do a proper introduction for you. Will Marshall is the co-founder and CEO of Planet. It's the world's largest Earth-observing satellite fleet, and soon orbiting AI data satellites. He's a physicist who earned his PhD at Oxford. Not a bad place, not MIT quite, but not a bad place.

**Dave Blundin** (3:52)
Okay, Will is where you jump in.

**Peter Diamandis** (3:55)
Before Planet, Will worked at NASA, and he and I met back in 2008 along with Salim. Today Planet is a $10 billion company. Following up on your point, Dave, I looked at the ticker, Will, and a 450 percent increase in the price over the last year. That's extraordinary, pretty amazing.
Will is operating 200 satellites in Earth orbit today, generating 25 terabytes of imagery every day. We have two major stories. The first is about planetary intelligence. The second is about Project Suncatcher. So Will, let's kick it off, buddy.