Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - We Gave Away $2,000,000 To 5 AI Builders | MOONSHOTS Live

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

The Build with Gemini X prize is presented by Gemini. Learn more at moonhsots.com Congratulations to the Build With Gemini X winners: 1st Place: POLYFORK by Lucas Martinic 2nd Place: TICIAN CIERRE by José Edgar Peña Ramirez 3rd Place: MYFIXAM by Jane Chukwuyen Odum and Ayodele Daniel Dada 4th Place: LAUNCHBRIDGE by Chase Rosen and Leonardo Fall 5th Place: DODOPREP by Naveed Ahmed —- Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends   Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360 Salim Ismail is the founder of Open ExO, a GP at Exponential Venture Capital/The Organizational Singularity Fund and a sought after global speaker and thought leader. Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified – Connect with Peter: X Instagram Substack Website Xprize A360 Connect with Dave: Web X LinkedIn Instagram TikTok Connect with Salim: LinkedIn X Join Salim’s 10X Shift Subscribe to Salim’s YouTube channel Exponential Venture Capital Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Substack  Spotify Threads Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube Follow MOONSHOTS:  Instagram TikTok X Threads – *Recorded on September 25th, 2026 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We'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. And 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. 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. 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 asset, especially as we move to a job.

where machines will be buying from other machines. Please welcome to the stage, the legendary Kathy Wood. It's Kathy Wood everybody! Good morning. Kathy just flew in from Portugal last night for this. Thank you so much, Kathy. All right, our next judge... Logan Kilpatrick. Logan Kilpatrick, product lead for Google AI Studio

and the Gemini API at Google DeepLine. 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 the people who use them?

Hopefully folks go and build their first hand. There's like so much subtlety in getting that right and the model crushed it. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Logan Hill Patrick. Logan, thank you so much and thank you to Gemini for your support on this. All right, our final judge. Founder and CEO Mark Pink has joins us now. He's a serial tech entrepreneur and investor best known as the founder of Zinga.

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 going to move as a culture from being consumptive to generative. Welcome to the stage, the amazing Mark Pinkus. All right, give it up for Mark Pinkis. Hey, buddy.

Please. Thank you, Mark. So, Logan, you're in the seat of our chief judge. Can I 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, you know, 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? Yeah, actually, that's true. I wanted to warm this up. Thank you for reminding me. So, yeah. I forgot. So just, you know, in a minute, you're all post-economic.

If you were starting with zero today, what would you do? You're just graduated school. You know, some bet you made wiped you out. You got to start again. Didn't have your network. You didn't have your wealth. What would you do today? Palmer tried 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. And we can, look, if people think SSRIs are fine, which they're not. But if they were, then oxytocin doping to stay together.

definitely fine. 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 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 there's there's, it's very well understood. Also, totally unregulated, which is great. Unregulated spaces are a lot of these. 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. I can't. Mark, you went 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 rates. Say, baby, I just made an order from Sigma Aldrich Chemicals Apply. I think we need to talk.

All right. I love that. It's, 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, you know, and it's also used for kids with various neurological issues, some kids with autism who struggle with parotting. And 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 dependence. 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 era would you go into? Oh, what area would you? Or what company would you start? Or give us a...

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 it is true, entry-level jobs are not filling up the way they used to, so 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. So 90% of all startups fail, but 10% succeed. So you absolutely are right. 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 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 health care is the most profound application. So 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 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 is 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-risk 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 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 value. 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 as 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 do. 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 you know it's so toxic and it's such it's such bad calories, it's so high in noise to signal. Palmer, you agree?

And 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 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 on these major social platforms.

And so I think 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. You know, as a guy who grew up on Ph.PV forums and has seen kind of that many of those communities moved 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-californ. stuff. Yeah, 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 X Prize are Dodo Prep, an AI native tutor that turns any study material into personalized learning, adapt, to each student's knowledge gaps in 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 Fixim building a task rabbit for Nigeria's informal artisan economy, helping workers find opportunities and get paid safely. Polyfork, creating AI-native 3D assets that anyone can recolor, resize, remix, and customize, and Tishensieri, 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 have five gigantic checks.

We have five. We got a bunch. That's my job. Okay. Are you guys ready? In fifth first. I think we're starting in first. Yes, yes. We're going to start with the fifth place. The fifth place winner is Dodo Prep. Oh, he can't. 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. I love that. Which are incredible designer, Joel Cave, produced, design, manufacture. It's gorgeous. It's like, I want one. Okay. I love it.

So, Navid, congratulations. You're getting a check for $100,000. Wow. A trophy, which we will send you. Congratulations, Navid. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And we're mailing it to India. Okay, in fourth place.

In fourth place, Launchbridge. Congrats guys. Congratulations. We're gonna do photos. There we go. Peter, I'll put in there. Come on, Dan. This is your Oscar.

And the trophy. Where's the trophy? The trophy is right here. You got it? Yes. Enjoy, gentlemen. I hope this investment goes far for you. Okay, are you guys ready?

In third place, there you go, there you go, please. Come in the middle, come in the middle, goes far to making my fix-um 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're now in second place or four places. Yes. Yes. Ticien, Sierra, and Polyford. Please join us on stage. So, stand on up. And TSEAN is on Zoom.

Yes. Can we see, hopefully he's still around? Here he is. All right. Edgar. Edgar. Okay. One of you is second, one of you is second, one of you is first. Okay, I need drum roll. Come on. Okay, the second place winner is Tisien Sierra.

All right, Tisiens, Edgar, congratulations. You have won $200,000. I don't know what that is in pesos, but congratulations, not nonetheless. Wow. And yeah, awesome. Come on out, my friend. First, First of all, look at this trophy. Congratulations. Wow. It's a beautiful trophy. Wow. And $500,000.

Congratulations. Thank you so much. Non-delutive C capital. It's the best kind. Gentlemen and lady, thank you so much for your time. Grateful for your friendship, all of you. Give it up for our judges. Palmer, Kathy, Logan.

Okay. When I sell much. my business. I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IDPrivatewealth.com.