Moonshots / Peter Diamandis
We Gave $2M To The AI Startup That Could Help The Most People | MOONSHOTS Live
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TL;DR
Research summary
▶ The challenge and its purpose
The speaker frames the prize around concern about jobs and the old path from school to a degree and employment, which he says is “cooked.” He describes a new social contract: find something you care about, and distinguishes a passion (something you love doing) from a purpose (something you love doing that helps other people). He urges people to identify a solvable problem that should not exist, then use AI and entrepreneurship to build a business and shape their career and future. In partnership with Google, the prize challenges teams to address a meaningful problem affecting 100,000 people and, in 90 days from a clean sheet of paper, build a revenue-generating, profitable company; the stated mission is to show others that this can be done.
▶ Judges introduced
The event introduces judges Palmer Luckey, Kathy Wood of Ark Invest, Logan Kilpatrick of Google DeepMind, and Mark Pincus, described as a serial tech entrepreneur and investor known as Zynga’s founder. In recorded remarks, Wood says AI is changing research and that Bitcoin could be especially important as agentic AI enables machines to buy from machines. Kilpatrick speaks about using AI to accelerate science and help humanity, personalization in AI products, and a model performing well on a “handle app.” Pincus says product quality should be judged by existing users and predicts a cultural shift from consumption to creation. The host thanks the judges and Gemini for supporting the event.
▶ Starting from zero
The host says that after five finalists present, the judges will deliberate backstage, then asks the judges what they would do if they had to start from zero after graduating, without their network or wealth. The prompt sets up a discussion of what problems they would pursue or companies they would start.
▶ Palmer Luckey’s proposed idea
Luckey proposes using oxytocin in marriage counseling to address divorce, describing it as a way to support mammal pair bonding. He and the host make claims about oxytocin’s safety, use, and lack of regulation; Luckey also says it can be purchased from Sigma-Aldrich and suggests it does not create chemical dependency. The discussion includes jokes about using it to help couples stay together, including for their children. Luckey says his interest comes from concern about natalism and the U.S. birth rate. These are claims made in the conversation, not independently established facts.
▶ Kathy Wood on AI, startups, and healthcare
Asked what she would build from zero, Wood says she would use AI and expects an entrepreneurial boom. She characterizes weaker entry-level hiring as an opportunity for young people to start AI-enabled companies without employees while continuing to interview, arguing that this could demonstrate initiative and problem-solving. She acknowledges that 90% of startups fail and says AI may improve success rates. Citing drug discovery as an example, she says AI could reduce the cost to discover and develop a drug from $2.4 billion, including failures, to $600–700 million, and reduce the timeline from 13 years to eight years or fewer. She calls healthcare the most profound application and recommends that people interested in healthcare or biology pursue it with AI.
▶ Data opportunities and social media
Kilpatrick says continued AI progress depends increasingly on data, after compute and data centers have received major investment. He sees opportunities in a growing data ecosystem and in startups contributing niche domain expertise, and says a high proportion of the current Y Combinator class is working on data, without giving a number. Pincus says he would redesign online social experiences using AI and agents, and gamify spending less time there because he considers current social platforms toxic and high in noise relative to signal. Luckey agrees about endless scrolling but notes that platforms also host useful, niche communities; he favors shifting time toward valuable content and away from doomscrolling. The host says he gets value from X but estimates that it represents about 10% of his time on the platform.
▶ Finalist projects announced
Five finalists are described: Dodo Prep turns study materials into personalized tutoring adapted to students’ knowledge gaps and progress; Launchbridge uses AI to help entrepreneurs set up a business, including an LLC, website, and payments, in under 72 hours; My Fixum aims to connect workers in Nigeria’s informal artisan economy with opportunities and safe payment; Polyfork creates customizable AI-native 3D assets; and Tishan Sierra uses AI to help Mexican businesses recover VAT credits by automating the preparation, auditing, and submission of claims. The host describes the teams as using AI to solve real problems and build businesses that can make a difference.
▶ Prize placements and closing
The event announces Dodo Prep in fifth place and awards it $100,000; the speaker says its representative is joining remotely and that the trophy will be mailed to India. Launchbridge is named fourth and My Fixum third, but their prize amounts are not stated. Tissian Sier is announced in second place and receives $200,000. The first-place recipient is brought forward and awarded $500,000 in non-dilutive seed capital, but the transcript does not identify the recipient by name. The host thanks the judges and asks for a group photo.
Full transcript
[0:31] Your purpose. You know, I define a passion as something you love doing. I define a purpose, something you love doing that helps other people. It's that simple. If you don't know your purpose, your job is to find it. So once you understand that sometime once you understand a problem that exists that should not exist, that is solvable, then put on your AI hat, put on your entrepreneurship hat and build that. and you can take agency in your life and create your own business, your own career, your own future. So that's the
[1:04] challenge we did. Went to our friends at Google, God bless them all. They've been extraordinary partners and friends for decades now. And we said, "Okay, let's do an X-P prize where we're going to challenge teams to find a problem that impacts 100,000 people. It should be something that's meaningful. and then we're going to give you 90 days from a clean sheet of paper to go build a revenuegenerating profitable company. The mission here is not those specific companies. The
[1:35] mission here is showing that it can be done to teach people to inspire people to do it themselves. So, I'm going to bring out our judges. Let's go ahead and roll video. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back to the stage Palmer Lucky. [music] >> Hey buddy, you're back. Palmer's back, everybody.
[2:06] You know something about building companies. Okay, our next judge is >> Kathy Wood, CEO and CIO of investment management firm Arc Invest. >> Arc Invest CEO Kathy Wood. You know, it's very interesting how AI is changing our research and how much more we can do. Now, we now have risk averse investors, certainly in the institutional world, less so in the retail world. Bitcoin, we believe, is going to be the most important crypto
[2:37] asset, especially as we move to agentic AI, where machines will be buying from other machines. Please welcome to the stage the legendary Kathy Wood. >> It's Kathy Wood, everybody. [music] [applause] >> Hi, Kathy. Good morning. Please. And Kathy [music] just flew in from Portugal last night for this. Thank you
[3:07] so much, Kathy. All right, our next judge, >> Logan Kilpatrick. >> Logan Kilpatrick, product lead for Google AI Studio and the Gemini API at Google Deep Mind. >> From day one, the goal of doing this technology has been like, how do we use AI to accelerate science and then ultimately help humanity? >> I think we have the best research team in the entire world. The number of AI products in the ecosystem, like how many of them are actually personalized to like the people who use them? >> Hopefully, folks go and build their
[3:37] first handle app. There's like so much subtle subtlety in getting that right and the model crushed it. >> Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Logan Hill Patrick. >> Logan. [music] Logan, thank you so much and thank you to Gemini for your support on this. All right, our final judge, >> founder and CEO Mark Pinkles joins us now. He's a serial tech entrepreneur and
[4:07] investor best known as the founder of Zinga. >> We have to separate our winning instincts from our [music] losing ideas. My job is to work with great product teams on great [music] products. What's actually better is what 10 out of 10 of the existing users of that product would say. Yeah. The more things change, the more they stay the same. And I think we're going to move as a culture from being consumptive to generative. Welcome to the stage the amazing Mark Pinkis. All right, give it up for Mark
[4:38] Pinkis. [music] Hey buddy. Ah, please. Thank you, Mark. So, Logan, you're in the seat of our chief judge. >> Move it along. Keep time. >> Cool. After our five finalists present, you're going backstage for a judge deliberation. I'll be back out to show you, you know, we had 20 other winning
[5:08] teams, but uh let me turn it over to you. >> I love it. Awesome. Um Peter, we're starting with uh questions around Do we still want to start with questions around uh >> Yeah, let me actually That's true. I wanted to warm this up. Thank you for reminding me. So, uh, yeah, [laughter] I forgot. So, uh, just, you know, in a in a minute, you're all post economic.
[5:39] If you were starting with zero today, what would you do? Right? You're just graduated school. Uh, you know, some bet you made wiped you out. You got to start again. You didn't have your network. You didn't have your wealth. What would you do today? Palmer try to end >> Tess. >> Yeah. >> I would try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for
[6:09] marriage counseling. We understand mammal pair bonding pretty well. There's a lot of people who want to stay together. Most of the people who don't want to stay together should stay together, especially for their kids. And we can uh look if if people think SSRIs are fine, which they're not, but if they were, then oxytocin doping to >> I've heard about this. It's really it's really critical, right? So, you know, people sort of drift apart over time. Oxytocin is safe, but it's >> safe. It's understood. We use it on Infants.
[6:39] >> It's the bonding hormone. >> That's right. It's the mammal pair bonding chemical. There's things you can do to increase the uptake and there's there it's very well understood. Also, totally unregulated, which is great. unregulated spaces are a lot easier to do. You can go buy a kilogram of oxytocin on Sigma Aldrich Chemical Supply right now. And if you do that, maybe you won't maybe you won't die alone. [laughter] >> I can't. >> Mark, you in on that one? >> Yeah. Yeah. I could have used that like
[7:09] eight years ago. >> It's never too late to call her up. >> But but I find that absolutely fascinating. Wait, 50% divorce rate. Hey baby, I just made an order from Sigma Aldrich Chemical Supply. I think we need to we need to talk. >> All [laughter] right. I I I love I love that. It's it's it's and it's bio it's pure biology. It's the moment of uh you know this is used for women who don't bond with their kids >> and now for for women who don't bond with their husbands. >> It's and it's also [laughter] you know and it's also used uh for for
[7:40] kids with various neurological issues. Uh some kids with autism who struggle with parani. The cool thing is it's a it's a self-reinforcing loop. We understand that very well. Unlike most drugs. It doesn't form a chemical dependency. It actually uh it uh unbburdens you from a chemical dependency. >> What inspired that idea, by the way? I mean, you're happy. >> Just just obsession with natalism and the birth rate in America. >> Amazing. Amazing. Kathy, uh beat that one. [laughter]
[8:10] >> You're going to have to repeat the question. So the question [laughter] the question is you're all post economic. If you had to start from zero again right now, what would you do? What would you what would you create? What area would you go into? >> Oh, what area >> or or what company would you start or you know give us a >> Yeah. >> Yeah. you know, I'm in an industry where the world is our oyster. And so, you know, I get to I get paid to learn uh
[8:42] and uh I do believe that uh AI is going to make us super intelligent. So, I of course would be leveraging AI as we are right now. But, uh I often say because I get the question all the time about, you know, joblessness. Isn't this isn't this going to be terrible? I I think we're going to have an entrepreneurial explosion. So I I I say and I I know I'm singing your song here, uh, Peter. So I I just say to these young kids because, you know, it is true entry level jobs
[9:14] are um are are are not filling up the way they used to. So people coming out of school um are unemployed and the average unemployment is six months. Uh the median is three months. But what I say to those young people is this is a blessing in disguise. Uh you should start your own company with AI and no employees. uh and keep keep interviewing and my
[9:44] guess is you'll get a job very quickly because you'll be showing initiative trying to solve a problem in the world and you're going to be using AI and everyone needs to uh import a lot of AI native AI talent >> or even better your company takes off and you tell them to go away. >> Well, you know that's what I that's exactly but you have to be realistic. So 90% of all startups fail some but 10% succeed. So you absolutely are right
[10:14] that that is the call option. >> Do you think that number is changing in the era of AI of success rates? >> I think it will. I do think it will change. I mean everything like our work for example in drug discovery you know it's the AI is going to reduce the number of failures and is going to cut the the the the cost to to uh launch develop discover develop a new drug from $2.4 4 billion including failures to 600
[10:44] to700 million and the time is going to drop from 13 years to eight years or or fewer uh which u I do believe healthc care is the most profound application. So I'd probably suggest to people who have any interest in in uh healthc care biology to to to go there and and go there with AI. >> Perfect. Logan, what's your answer? >> Yeah, I think there's a huge opportunity. I mean, I think I I spend all my time thinking about how we
[11:14] accelerate progress towards making better AI models. And I'm sure there's a lot of folks in the audience who think about this, too. Um, I think the opportunity, and the way that I frame this, people is like we've derisked the recipe to keep making progress on AI. Um, we we know how to do it. I think all the labs know how to do this. Um I think over the last three years we've derisked compute with you know hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars even more billions of dollars space data centers all these things the last bit to that's really now the bottleneck to keep making progress is data and so you see
[11:44] this like massive explosion of this data ecosystem and industry and it it's still like very early innings. You look at like even the best companies in this market are like10 billion dollar companies and will probably be much much more valuable very very soon and then you see the like breadth of startups and people bringing these like really niche interesting domain expertise to help sort of accelerate this because the models need to be good at everything. So um I think there's just massive opportunity you can like proxy this off of like YC startups as an example like the percentage of YC startups in the
[12:15] current class that are doing data stuff is like extremely high. I don't know what the number is. I'll >> aggregate unique data and and then sell that package. Agree. Mark, so curious to hear what you're going to say. >> At the risk of sounding really uh obvious what you'd expect me to say, I'll do it anyway. I would I would look to reimagine and reinvent uh our online social experience and leverage AI and
[12:45] agents and and gamify how little time you can spend there because I feel, you know, it's so toxic and it's such it's such bad calories. It's it's so high in noise to signal. [applause] >> Palmer, you agree? And I feel like as one of the like early uh people in in social, I I feel like it started off as this magic um kind of magical cocktail
[13:15] party and it's become something that I think nobody uh feels good about. No one's proud. I mean, how much time you just spent on Instagram or or any of these things like they're kind of >> Palmer, you're nodding your head. >> I think that you're right. on average. I also think uh I I've managed to curate a pretty good feed and like there's a lot of good online communities for people who are doing very specific things, very very niche things that kind of only work because you know they're they're they're
[13:46] on these major social platforms. And so I I think uh I like the idea of keeping people out of out of the app as much as possible on kind of the unintentional just like you know endless scrolling doom scrolling side of things. Uh, but you know, as a guy who grew up on PHPVB forums and has seen kind of that many of those communities move to social media, like that's intentional time. It's like, oh, I want to see what people are doing with softwaredefined radios today. Luckily, I'm in the Southern California software defined radios enthusiast group. [laughter] And, you know, it's
[14:16] that's uh that that that stuff is good. So, I think the more that we could shift from the crappy stuff to the high calorie stuff, uh, the >> Yeah. And I and I'll say like X is my social network. I follow you there and I I get tons of value out of it. But if I'm being honest, I think that value is probably like 10% of the time I'm on X. >> And the nominees for this year's build with Gemini XP prize are Dodo Prep, an
[14:46] AI native tutor that turns any study material into personalized learning, adapting to each student's knowledge gaps and progress. Launchbridge using AI to take an entrepreneur from an idea to a fully formed business with an LLC website and payments set up in under 72 hours. My fixum building a task rabbit for Nigeria's informal artisan economy helping workers find opportunities and get paid safely. Polyfork creating AI
[15:17] native 3D assets that anyone can recolor, resize, remix and customize. and Tishan Sierra using AI to help Mexican businesses recover VAT credits by automating the complex process of preparing, auditing, and submitting their claims. Five teams using AI to solve real problems and build businesses that can make a difference. >> Okay. Do >> you have one of those gigantic checks? >> Uh, we do have five.
[15:48] >> Yeah, we got a we got a bunch. That's my [laughter] job. Okay, are you guys ready? >> In fifth first, I think we're starting. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. We're going to start with the fifth place. >> The fifth place winner is Dodo Prep. [applause] Come on out. Dodo Prep. >> Oh, he can't join us through the internet. >> Through the internet.
[16:19] And and by the way, if I could take a second, uh we have the Oscar of optimism here. >> Love that. >> Which our incredible designer Joel Cave produced, designed, manufactured. It's gorgeous. I It's like I want one. >> Okay. >> I love it. >> Uh so Naveiv >> Naveiv, congratulations. Uh, you're getting a check for $100,000. >> Wow. [applause and cheering]
[16:50] >> And this trophy which we will send to you. [applause] >> Congratulations, Navidid. >> Thank you, Navidid. >> Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome. >> And we're mailing it to India. >> Okay. In fourth place, >> in fourth place, Launchbridge. >> Come back. Come on out. Launch bridge. Congratulations. [applause] >> Congrats, guys. >> Congratulations.
[17:20] >> We're going to do photos. Yep. >> There we go. >> Peter in there. >> Come on, Dan. >> This is your Oscar for the [applause] for your >> And your And the trophy. Where's the trophy? Trophy is over there. >> You got it. Okay. >> Enjoy, gentlemen. I hope this investment goes far for you. Congrats. >> Congrats. >> Okay, are you guys ready? In third place, my fixum.
[17:50] >> Come on out, my fix. [applause] >> Congratulations. >> Go. There you go. Congratulations. >> Come in the middle. Come in the middle. >> Right here, guys. Congratulations. [applause] We hope this goes far to making my fixum dominate. A pleasure. Congratulations.
[18:20] >> Congrats, guys. Okay. Super important. >> Before announcing the second and first place, we want both teams to come on. >> Yes, both teams should come on out. >> Okay. >> Cuz it's kind of obvious once you announce second place or third places. >> Yes. Tissen Sier and Polyfort, please join us on stage. [applause] >> So, uh, so stand on up. Uh, and, uh, TCN
[18:50] is on Zoom. >> Yes. >> Uh, can we see? Hopefully, he's still around. >> There he is. All right. Edgar. >> Edgar. >> Okay. You're either one of you is second, one of you is first. >> Okay, I need drum roll. Come on. [applause] >> Okay, the second place winner is Tissian Sier.
[19:20] [applause] >> Bring out the checks. >> Congratulations. [applause] Now we hire you. >> That's crazy. Look at this. All right, Tissen or Edgar, congratulations. You have won uh $200,000. I don't know what that is in pesos, but um >> there you go. >> Congratulations. Not nonetheless. >> Wow. >> And uh yeah. Awesome. [applause]
[19:54] >> Come on out, my friend. First of all, look at this trophy. >> Congratulations. >> Wow. It's a beautiful trophy. >> Wow. >> And $500,000. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> Non-dilutive seed capital. The best kind. [applause] [music] >> Wow. >> That'll get diluted by taxes. [laughter] >> Gentlemen and lady, thank you so much
[20:25] for your time. Grateful for your friendship, all of you. Give it up for our judges, Palmer, Kathy, Logan, and Mark. [applause] Can I Can I get a quick photo with you guys for a second?