We Gave Away $2,000,000 To 5 AI Builders | MOONSHOTS Live

0:00We're about to award the Build with Gemini XPRIZE. So what is that? You know, a lot of people are concerned about jobs and they're concerned about the old social contract. Do well in high school, go to college, get a degree and go get a job. That, to quote my dear friend AWG, is cooked. So here's the new social contract. Find something that you care about deeply, 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, sometimes, 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.

0:55And you can take agency in your life and create your own business, your own career, your own future. So that's the 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 XPRIZE 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 revenue-generating, profitable company. The mission here is not those specific companies. The mission here is showing that it can be done to teach people, to inspire people to do it themselves.

1:42So 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 Luckey.

2:00Hey buddy, you're back. Palmer's back everybody. You know something about building companies. Okay, our next judge is... Cathy Wood, CEO and CIO of investment management firm Ark Invest. Ark Invest CEO Cathy 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 asset, especially as we move to agentic AI, where machines will be buying from other machines. Please welcome to the stage the legendary Cathie Wood.

2:49It's Cathie Wood, everybody!

2:56Hi, Cathie. Good morning. Please. And Cathie just flew in from Portugal last night for this. Thank you so much, Cathy. All right, our next judge.

3:36build their first hand. 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!

3:54Logan, thank you so much. And thank you to Gemini for your support on this. All right, our final judge.

4:04He's a serial tech entrepreneur and investor best known as the founder of Zynga. We have to separate our winning instincts from our losing ideas. My job is to work with great product teams on great 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 gonna move as a culture from being consumptive to generative. Welcome to the stage, the amazing Mark Pincus. All right, give it up for Mark Pincus. Hey, buddy. Please. Thank you, Mark. So, Logan, you're in the seat of our chief judge.

4:55to move it along, keep time. After our five finalists present, you're going backstage for Judge Liberation. I'll be back out to show you we had 20 other winning teams, but let me turn it over to you. I love it. Awesome. Peter, we're starting with questions around, do we still want to start with questions around what you're going after? That's true. I wanted to warm this up. Thank you for reminding me. So, yeah, I forgot.

5:31So, just, you know, in a minute, you're all post-economic. If you were starting with zero today, what would you do? Right? You're just graduated school. 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 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.

6:21And we can, look, if people think SSRIs are fine, which they're not, but if they were, then oxytocin doping to stay together is definitely fine. So I've heard about this. It's really critical, right? So, you know, people sort of drift apart over time. Oxytocin is safe, but it's the... It's safe, it's understood. We use it on mothers and infants. 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 it's very well understood. Also, totally unregulated, which is great. unregulated spaces or a lot easier to do. You can go buy a kilogram of oxytocin on Sigma Aldrich chemical supply right now.

6:56And if you do that, maybe you won't, maybe you won't die alone. I can't. Mark, you in on that one? Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't use that like eight years ago. It's never too late. Call her up. But I find that absolutely fascinating. Wait, 50 % divorce rate. Say, baby, I just made an order from Sigma Aldrich Chemical Supply. I think we need to talk. All right. I love that. And it's pure biology. It's the moment of, you know, this is used for women who don't bond with their kids. And now for women who don't bond with their husbands. And it's also used for kids with various neurological issues, some kids with autism who struggle with Peyronie.

7:45And the cool thing is it's a self-reinforcing loop. We understand that very well. Unlike most drugs, it doesn't form a chemical dependency. It actually unburdens you from a chemical dependency. So what inspired that idea, by the way? I mean, you're happy. Just obsession with natalism and the birth rate in America. Amazing, amazing. Kathy, beat that one. You're going to have to repeat the question. So 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 create? What area would you go into? Oh, what area? Or what company would you start?

8:30Or, you know, give us a... Yeah. You know, I'm in an industry where the world is our oyster. And so, you know, I get paid to learn. and I do believe that AI is going to make us super intelligent. So I, of course, would be leveraging AI as we are right now. But I often say, because I get the question all the time about, you know, joblessness, isn't this going to be terrible? I think we're going to have an entrepreneurial explosion. So I say, and I know I'm singing your song here, Peter, so I just say to these young kids, because, you know, it is true, entry-level jobs are not filling up the way they used to.

9:18So people coming out of school are unemployed, and the average unemployment is six months. The median is three months. But what I say to those young people is, this is a blessing in disguise. You should start your own company with AI and no employees. and keep interviewing. And my 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 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 exactly, but you have to be realistic.

10:06So 90 % of all startups fail, but 10 % succeed. So you absolutely are right 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, the AI is going to reduce the number of failures and is going to cut the cost to launch, develop, discover, develop a new drug from$2.4 billion, including failures, to 600 to 700 million. And the time is going to drop from 13 years to eight years or fewer, which I do believe healthcare is the most profound application.

10:57So I'd probably suggest to people who have any interest in healthcare biology to go there and go there with AI. Perfect. Logan, what's your answer? Yeah, I think there's a huge opportunity. I mean, I think I spend all my time thinking about how we 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. I think the opportunity and the way that I frame this to people like we've de-risked the recipe to keep making progress on AI. We know how to do it. I think all the labs know how to do this. I think over the last three years, we've de-risked compute with, you know, hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, even more billions of dollars, space data centers, all these things.

11:38The last bit that's really now the bottleneck to keep making progress is data. And so you see this like massive explosion of this data ecosystem and industry, and it's still like very early innings. You look at like even the best companies in this market are like$10 billion 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 I think there's just massive opportunity. You can like proxy this off of like YC startups.

12:12As an example, like the percentage of YC startups in the current class that are doing data stuff is like extremely high. I don't know what the number is. Aggregate unique data and then sell that package. Exactly. Mark, so curious to hear what you're going to say. At the risk of sounding really obvious of what you'd expect me to say, I'll do it anyway. I would look to reimagine and reinvent our online social experience and leverage AI and agents and gamify how little time you can spend there because I feel it's so toxic and it's such bad calories. It's so high in noise to signal. Palmer, you agree?

13:03And I feel like as one of the early people in social, I feel like it started off as this magic, kind of magical cocktail party, and it's become something that I think nobody feels good about. No one's proud, I mean, how much time you just spent on Instagram or any of these things, like they're kind of shit. Palmer, you're nodding your head. I think that you're right on average. I also think I've managed to curate a pretty good feed, and 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 they're on these major social platforms.

13:47So I think I like the idea of keeping people out of the app as much as possible and kind of the unintentional, just like endless scrolling, doom scrolling side of things. You know, as a guy who grew up on PHPV 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 software-defined radios today. Luckily, I'm in the Southern California software-defined radios enthusiast group. And, you know, that stuff is good. So I think the more that we could shift from the crappy stuff to the high-calorie stuff.

14:22Yeah, and I'll say like X is my social network. I follow you there and 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 XPRIZE are Dodo Prep, an AI native tutor that turns any study material into personalized learning, adapting to each student's knowledge gaps and progress. Launch Bridge, 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. MyFixim, building a task rabbit for Nigeria's informal artisan economy, helping workers find opportunities and get paid safely.

15:15PolyFork, creating AI-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? We do! We got a bunch. That's my job. Okay, are you guys ready? In fifth first. Yes, yes, yes. We're going to start with the fifth place. The fifth place winner is Dodo Prep.

16:09Come on out, Dodo Prep. Oh, he can't. He's joining us through the internet. Through the internet. And by the way, if I could take a second, we have the Oscar of Optimism here. Love that. Which our incredible designer, Joel Cave, produced, designed, manufactured. It's gorgeous. It's like, I want one. Okay. I love it. So... Naveed, congratulations. You're getting a check for$100 ,000. Wow.

16:50And this trophy, which we will send to you. Congratulations, Naveed. Thank you, Naveed. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And we're mailing it to India. Okay, in fourth place. In fourth place, Launch Bridge. Come on out, launch page.

17:17Congratulations. Congrats, guys. Congratulations. We're going to do photos. There we go. Peter, I'll put you in there. Come on, Dan. This is your Oscar. For your book. And your trophy. Where's your trophy? The trophy's right there. You got it? Yes. Enjoy, gentlemen. I hope this investment goes far for you. Okay, are you guys ready? In third place, My Fixem. Come on out, My Fixem.

17:59Congratulations. Go, there you go. Please, come on in the middle. Come in the middle.

18:13Congratulations. We hope this goes far to making Mike Fixum dominate. A pleasure. Congratulations. Congrats, guys. Okay. Before announcing the second and first place, we want both teams to come on. Yes, both teams should come on out. Because it's kind of obvious once you announce second place or fourth place. Yes. Tissian, Sierra, and Polyfork. Please join us on stage.

18:46So, stand on up. And Tissian is on Zoom. Yes. Can we see? Hopefully, he's still around. Here he is. Edgar. Edgar. Okay. Either one of you is second one of you is first. Okay, I need drum roll. Come on Okay, the second place winner is TCN Sierra

19:22Bring out the checks! You got checks! Now you can hire you! That's crazy, look at this! All right, Ticien, Edgar, congratulations, you have won$200 ,000. I don't know what that is in pesos, but congratulations nonetheless. the less and yeah awesome

19:53come on out my friend first of all look at this trophy congratulations it's a beautiful trophy and$500 ,000 congratulations non-dilutive seed capital

20:18That'll get diluted by taxes. Gentlemen and lady, thank you so much for your time. Grateful for your friendship, all of you. Let's give it up for our judges, Palmer, Kathy, Logan, and Mark. Can I get a quick photo with you guys for a second?