Palmer Luckey: Autonomous Weapons Are Ancient and Why Anduril Won't Build Humanoids | EP #295
Peter DiamandisSalim IsmailDave BlundinAlexander Wissner-GrossPalmer Luckey
Anduril’s wildfire XPRIZE win shows how its autonomy workflow applies to civil emergencies, where response time changes the engineering. The $2.2 million award—$1 million from Lockheed—involved detection, classification, false-positive filtering, agent selection, and delivery. Unlike a bomb, “the difference between a 10-minute and an hour-long response requires completely different tools” because fire compounds while the system travels.
Luckey puts AI extinction far below the risk of malicious people using “moderately competent AI” to do harm. His base case is radically deflationary: AI should bring the scale economics already achieved in agriculture and textiles into the rest of society. His benchmark for abundance: two weeks of calories can already cost less than one hour of federal minimum wage.
Front-line autonomy is operationally unavoidable because centralized intelligence creates communications and command-center vulnerabilities. Links can be jammed, intercepted, or broken, and adversaries can target the control center; underwater platforms may not connect at all. Luckey argues the conceptual Rubicon was crossed decades—or millennia—ago: Aegis, SeaWiz, SeaRAM, Vietnam-era missiles that homed on radio emitters, mines, and even weight-selective pit traps already executed programmed intent without real-time human confirmation.
Today’s general foundation models are largely the wrong technology for Anduril’s weapons stack. Luckey calls them non-deterministic and difficult to verify: text-in/text-out models do not classify raw radar data or process passive sonar. Anduril has been working on this specialized category since 2017, and its “AI” initials were “no accident at all.”
A universal defense robot loses precisely where specialization commands the highest premium. A humanoid that is 5% worse may still win commercially by serving factories, hospitals, and restaurants, but a consistent 5% combat advantage can justify enormous spending. Defense therefore resembles motorsport more than mass-market cars: “exotic, highly specialized robotic systems” will keep outrunning common platforms.
Anduril will use humanoids but will not build them, because Luckey believes other teams are already doing that well. Humanoids could operate legacy radars worth millions or hundreds of millions of dollars without exposing people, yet building them would add little marginal impact. The same logic keeps Anduril out of small impact quadcopters and launch services while it builds space products, satellites, and sensors.
Anduril’s business model attacks a procurement market where, a few years ago, five companies received roughly 80% of major defense acquisition programs. It self-funds products and then sells working systems, converting successful program managers into repeat buyers. The founding pitch was audaciously economic: save taxpayers “hundreds of billions of dollars a year while earning tens of billions” by replacing systems costing 10 times what they should.
AI may automate technical craft long before it reaches the founder’s least glamorous responsibilities. Luckey expects roughly 10 years of accelerated progress in other business processes before AI reaches legal accountability, fundraising, product architecture, personnel calls, and conflict resolution. His warning to would-be solo founders: “Being a founder has always felt like AI took your job. It was just taken away by other people.”
Luckey’s VR lesson is ergonomic rather than merely computational. His Santa Cruz prototypes put battery and computing at the back of the head, and he says the CV1 had near-perfect ergonomics. He praises Meta’s new View glasses for moving computing and batteries outside the head, using flexible “transformable fabric,” and costing one-third as much as an Apple product while offering slightly higher pixel density and eight times less weight.
1. Autonomy turns wildfire response into a race against compounding damage
Anduril won the $2.2 million wildfire XPRIZE, including $1 million supplied by Lockheed—a company Luckey described as both collaborator and competitor. The project traces back to an autonomous firefighting tank Anduril began in 2017 and completed in 2019; in his view, the technology had been possible for more than a decade, but the problem had become “politically impossible to ignore.”
The demonstrated stack moved from fire detection and classification to filtering false alarms such as cigarettes, bonfires, and road flares. It then selected an extinguishing agent suited to the fire, terrain, and required speed before “reaching out to the target and defeating it”—almost the same sequence Anduril uses for military projects.
The critical difference is temporal: a target remains a target whether delivery takes a minute or a day, whereas a spreading fire may demand an entirely different vehicle after an hour. Luckey’s compressed formulation: “The difference between a 10-minute and an hour-long response requires completely different tools.”
2. AI risk lies with human intent, while battlefield autonomy is already old
Asked for his probability of AI doom, Luckey declined the premise: “I’m just not worried about AI destroying us.” He is “really, really worried” about evil people wielding moderately capable systems, and criticized recent doom converts who had spent little time studying broader existential threats.
His upside case is an economy-wide collapse in resource extraction, processing, and conversion costs. Agriculture and textiles show the destination: “You can buy a 2-week supply of calories for less than 1 hour of federal minimum wage.” He expects AI to extend those scale efficiencies across society.
Dave Blundin’s challenge was where intelligence should sit: headquarters offers more compute, while field systems offer speed. Luckey said latency is secondary to survivability—thousands of assets cannot depend on links that an enemy can jam, intercept, or break, while adversaries can target the control center. His Battle of Naboo analogy: destroy the Trade Federation’s central AI, and “all the battle droids lost power.”
Nor does Luckey accept that autonomous weapons represent a wholly new category. Aegis, SeaWiz, SeaRAM, and Vietnam-era missiles that identified radio emitters could act without confirmation after a human defined the mission area; much older pit traps could selectively catch a mounted commander because of his weight. “We’ve had autonomous weapons for a very, very long time.”
3. For defense, verifiable specialist models matter more than general foundation models
Diamandis—not Blundin—asked whether Anduril would use Chinese open-source foundation models or build its own. Luckey’s answer: today’s foundation models are “largely non-deterministic” and cannot be adequately verified for the relevant tasks. Large language models may have defense uses, but “they don’t guide my missiles or classify radar data.”
Anduril instead needs systems that ingest raw radar and passive sonar rather than text prompts. Luckey said the company has been working on this specialized category since 2017 and deliberately named itself Anduril Industries so its initials would be AI: “It was no accident at all.”
The forthcoming $10 million XPRIZE points in another direction: understanding how animals think and communicating with intelligent wild species “ten times better” in their own languages. Luckey thinks nonhuman cognition might eventually inform AI, particularly its energy efficiency, time efficiency, and alternative ways of perceiving problems.
4. Defense will reward exotic machines, not one universal robot
Alexander Wissner-Gross asked whether autonomous systems might converge on a general-purpose killer robot. Luckey sees plausible convergence in manufacturing, hospitality, and medicine: a humanoid 5% worse at frying burgers could still win if the same platform also works as a nurse or assembly technician.
Defense reverses that trade-off because a consistent 5% edge over an adversary can be worth immense spending. Anduril builds robotic submarines shaped to reach 6,000 meters and remain on the seabed for months, surface systems that drive up to hills and wait, and specialized aircraft. A machine able to reach both the ocean floor and the Moon “could get to the moon a lot faster if it didn’t have to dive.”
Diamandis expected Luckey to build humanoids; Luckey’s blunt response was, “You are wrong.” Precisely because he believes humanoids have a powerful future, he expects other teams to supply them while Anduril uses them to operate legacy radars and other human-designed equipment. Defense, he concluded, is closer to motorsport than common automotive platforms.
5. Anduril wins by self-funding products—and founders remain accountable
Salim Ismail framed defense ministries as historically centralized institutions with formidable “organizational immune systems.” Luckey said fundraising was initially the hardest problem because investors believed Anduril could build products but doubted governments could buy them at scale; a few years ago, about 80% of major defense acquisition programs went to five companies.
Anduril broke through as “less of a contractor and more of a product company”: it spends its own money, builds first, and then sells. On-time delivery lets people in government benefit from choosing it, creating a simple repeat loop: “I know how to make my job easier. I just gave the contract to Anduril.”
Luckey borrowed his risk logic from John Carmack: even if a direct attempt at AGI had only a 1% chance of succeeding, the risk-weighted outcome could demand the attempt. Luckey applied the same reasoning to defense, preferring a small chance of fixing an enormous problem over starting another gaming, cars, or rockets company.
He also argues that some retired billionaires have an underused resource beyond capital: authority. Because people trust them to lead, they can rally teams and capital around difficult problems, and Luckey regards leaving that capacity idle as unacceptable.
His formative training came from ModRetro, an online hardware-modding community he created at 14 or 15 and grew to several thousand active participants. It taught him promotion, organizational design, how to keep two brilliant people who hate each other contributing without “killing each other,” and the value of doing projects openly with other people.
On VR, Luckey’s product lesson is ergonomic: his Santa Cruz prototypes put battery and computing at the back of the head, while he says the CV1 had near-perfect ergonomics. He praises Meta’s new View glasses for moving computing and batteries outside the head, using flexible “transformable fabric,” and costing one-third as much as an Apple product while offering slightly higher pixel density and eight times less weight.
AI does not remove the founder’s burden. Founders remain responsible for legal accountability, fundraising, architecture, personnel, and deciding when to reverse bad calls; meanwhile, craftspeople may experience code generation as artists experienced the camera. Luckey’s dividing line: “If you want to work with technology, work for someone else. If you want to constantly deal with nonsense, start a company.”
Full transcript
Wow, it’s much brighter here.
That’s right. Well, you know, the future is bright. There are lens flares in the future.
Yes. So, congratulations to everyone at the Oscars of optimism. Of course, we open the summit with the king of autonomous weapons systems.
Let me start by saying that this week we are awarding 3 XPRIZEs. Palmer, congratulations on winning our XPRIZE Wildfire competition.
Thank you very much. We worked on this for a long time.
Come on, let’s bring the slide up on the screen. Palmer won $2.2 million for Anduril—as if you needed it. A million of that amount is from Lockheed, which is quite interesting.
We work a lot with Lockheed. We also compete with them, but in the defense sector, we compete with their fighter division and cooperate on some of their payloads. We do a lot of things together.
You and I have both been trying to get this autonomous firefighting thing going for a long time. You announced this award back in 2019, and a lot of time has passed.
One of Anduril’s first 2 products was an autonomous firefighting tank, which we started building in 2017 and completed in 2019. It’s crazy that we allow fires to become natural disasters before we put them out.
It’s ridiculous that people say, “Technology finally made this possible.” I won’t correct them publicly too often, but it’s been possible for more than a decade. It has simply become politically impossible to ignore this problem now.
Now let’s watch a 1-minute video about what your team has achieved. Can you comment on it?
1. Fire Detection, Classification, and Response
Of course. This was an example of what we were doing at the range, where we were detecting and classifying fires. What isn’t really visible here is that you also need to filter out false fires. This was also part of the tests.
You have to distinguish between someone smoking a cigarette, a bonfire, a road flare, and something that has the characteristics of a real fire. This is something that emergency services should be notified about.
Then you need to choose the right extinguishing agent depending on the type of fire in the area. You want to use the most effective tool that can react and arrive on time. If the object is moving faster, something else may be needed.
Depending on whether it’s a forest or a hill covered in bushes, different solutions may be required. It’s all about detection, classification, screening, selection of means, and then reaching the target and defeating it.
Lastly, in most of our projects, particularly for the military, you go through the same steps. But if you’ve found a target, whether it takes you an hour to get there or 10 minutes often doesn’t matter much.
When it comes to a fire, the difference between a 10-minute response and an hour-long response requires completely different tools. A bomb is still a bomb, regardless of whether it takes a day, an hour, or a minute to deliver it. But when a fire spreads, you need to choose the right means to put it out before it gets too big.
We are going to announce the funding of the new XPRIZE in a month. Until then, it’s a secret, but now we’ll lift the curtain a little. Another prize of $10 million. Will you share with us what we will be doing?
2. Biological Intelligence and Animal Communication
Of course. We have to keep the details secret because there are interesting nuances, but I’ll say this: I’m not interested in spending money on racing with artificial intelligence. I believe that the field of artificial intelligence is already well understood by many people.
I think we don’t do enough studying of biological intelligence, especially outside of humans. So this prize will be dedicated to understanding how animals think, so that we can communicate with them 10 times better than the current level allows for the most intelligent species.
And not just with trained animals, but with wild ones—in their own language. I think we will be able to learn a lot of new things.
If you look at the major language models, they are based on a distilled way of thinking and communicating developed by humanity. I believe we can learn a lot from all the other species on this planet.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this finds applications in AI, especially where greater efficiency is needed: energy efficiency, time efficiency, or a different way of looking at things. One head is good, but 2 are better—whatever metaphor you want to use.
I like it. Okay, I’ll start with the first official question. Probability of death from AI, or P(doom): You’re in the AI industry and in the defense industry. What is your assessment of the probability of death from AI?
I’m just not worried about AI destroying us. I’m not worried about AI killing us. I’m really, really worried about evil people who use moderately competent AI to commit evil deeds.
3. AI’s Impact on Costs and Society
I’m a little disappointed in a lot of people who have just gotten into this hobby of predicting doom. It’s like how we dealt with the war in Ukraine, when suddenly all these people who had the most absurd ideas about the army their whole lives—and people who believed that we were living at the end of history, that we had overcome conflicts, that we lived in a world where you could just write an angry letter to the UN—forgot that it only works when backed up by a real threat of violence.
Then they suddenly changed their minds. You see it with AI. People who haven’t thought about this problem for more than a few years, or maybe even a few months, are saying, “Oh my God, this is the biggest threat to humanity”—people who have spent almost no time analyzing what the biggest threats to humanity are.
They did not speak to any experts in the field. They certainly weren’t buying freeze-dried food or building bunkers like me and many of my friends, who indulged in fantasies about what the end of the world might look like and also actually thought about it.
So yes, the likelihood of death from AI is way down the list for me. I am a great optimist. I think this will significantly reduce the cost of extracting, processing, and converting resources.
You will see every part of society become subject to the same economies of scale and efficiency that industries automated without AI have already seen. Think about agriculture or the textile industry. You can buy a 2-week supply of calories for less than 1 hour of federal minimum wage. This is madness.
Let’s give Palmer a round of applause. Dave.
I have a very urgent question. I specialize a bit in systems, chips, and basic AI models. When you put systems and weapons in the field, you can put intelligence into them. That has always been a big problem for the Air Force.
4. Autonomous Weapons and Historical Examples
For example, if we start using drones instead of pilots, who will use the weapons, and how will that decision be made? The downside of transmitting data back to headquarters is the delay. The advantage is that you have much more computing power.
What you can put locally in a device, in the field, or in an airplane is limited, but it is very, very fast. So what’s your philosophy? I think a lot of people are going to ask, “What, are we going to have autonomous decision-making systems roaming around hostile territory?”
Will we have control from headquarters?
More or less. The real concern is not so much latency or computational speed. The problem is that if you rely on a central location for computing, you now need to have a management system that provides reliable, high-speed communication between you and potentially thousands or tens of thousands of active objects.
If the enemy jams your communication, intercepts it, or breaks it, you’re finished. Or worse, they simply won’t aim at the equipment in the field, but will go to where it’s all controlled.
You know, we saw it in a documentary that George Lucas was working on: The Trade Federation blew up its central AI control, and that’s how the Battle of Naboo ended. All the battle droids lost power.
That’s why I believe this is the practical reality that dictates the need to have autonomy not in the rear, but on the front lines. There are other realms, like underwater, where you can’t connect to anything.
Sometimes you can connect, but you don’t want to. Using radio radiation inevitably exposes you. So whether you like it or not, you’re going to have to do it.
I don’t really think it’s as big a change as many people think. There are a lot of people who look at this and say, “Oh my God, Pandora’s box is opening. You will have weapons that will make their own decisions about killing.”
5. Scaling Laws and the Future of Autonomous Robots
But they don’t realize the reality, which is that this has been going on for decades. Look at the Aegis system on destroyers. It has a fully autonomous mode. You can press a button, and it will shoot down anything that comes within a programmed radius, without any human confirmation.
Look at SeaWiz and SeaRAM for shooting down missiles, mortar shells, artillery fire, or approaching boats—the same thing. You can put them in a completely autonomous mode.
Ever since Vietnam, we’ve had missiles that could be launched from an airplane. They flew over the horizon, tried to identify radio emitters that corresponded to the positions of anti-aircraft missile systems, and then hit them without human intervention.
The person just decided, “I’ll send it to this area.” The missile would look for that signal, and the person knew there was a certain probability that it would get it right.
That decision will be up to people, but autonomous weapons are a separate, big conversation that we won’t have today, although I have a lot of thoughts on the fact that autonomous weapons have actually been around for thousands of years.
If we consider it a weapon capable of carrying out the intent of whoever programmed it, regardless of the operator or engineer, look, for example, at pit traps that allow people to pass through but trap a commander on horseback because he is heavier. You can look at certain poison traps that killed people with certain characteristics without harming other people or animals. You can look at many types of land and sea mines, and even torpedoes.
So it all depends on your exact definition, even if you think of myths where people created golems that could go out and fight on their behalf or defend their city. I guess my argument is that we've had autonomous weapons for a very, very long time. It's just a new set of technologies that makes them better.
6. Specialized Robots vs. Humanoids
So the technical question about this is the basic models that are embedded in these remote systems, or in pitfall traps. Yes, now the open-source models are all Chinese, so I'm sure you won't introduce Chinese models into remote weapons. Are you going to create your own basic Anduril models, or how are you going to implement AI into these devices?
Listen, we've been doing this since 2017, so we are way ahead of everyone. We are already decades ahead of this issue. I think the foundation models that people are creating now are not the models that are suitable for this. They are largely nondeterministic. They cannot be verified. This is a completely different category.
What we build, unfortunately, has very few consumer applications, and vice versa. Sure, there are use cases for large language models in defense that make sense, but they don't guide my missiles or classify radar data. We cannot create models that receive text and output text. I need to process raw radar data. I need to process sonar data from passive listening stations on submarines. This is a very specialized field.
And I take some credit for that. All these people talking about how AI will change everything are mostly recent neophytes. Anduril Industries—you may have noticed that the abbreviation is AI—so it was no accident at all.
Okay, Alex, join in.
I think, continuing our discussion about driving, we're now in an era where you can take advanced models, implement them in robots, and get some pretty amazing results. So I would like to ask you a question about the scaling hypothesis in relation to autonomous weapons systems, or autonomous systems in general. Extrapolating, does Moore's Law exist?
Is there an experience curve for how the capabilities of advanced foundation models evolve, whether from labs or AI companies, or are we seeing some equivalent of Moore's Law for autonomous systems themselves? And maybe the second part of the question is: Do you think we will eventually achieve some kind of convergence?
7. Centralized Defense AI and Military Robotics
You at Anduril create different incarnations in different form factors. Do you ultimately see some kind of universal killer-robot category that would be analogous to a generalist robot, just as we now have generalist models that can potentially perform any task?
No, I don't think so in the defense sector. I think it's possible in manufacturing, hospitality, and medicine because there's an economy of scale that's really important for those types of businesses. And you know, a humanoid robot might not be the optimal shape for frying burgers. This may not be the optimal form for a firefighter. This may not be the optimal form for a nurse or assembly technician.
So you just smile. Even if it's not optimal, the fact that the shape is similar to a human's makes it a very, very successful form factor. And now I can create one robot that will perform all these tasks. I would probably be better off choosing a robot that is 5% slower or, say, less reliable than the optimal burger-frying robot if I can unify it with a robot nurse.
In the defense sector, this is not entirely true because you are constantly participating in races where you need to not just barely outrun your opponent, but significantly outpace him. The goal is not to win the conflict only minimally. The goal is to act dishonestly in order to have an overwhelming threat of force that underpins any diplomatic overtures or negotiations.
Everyone is always pushing the boundaries of what is possible. So, if I have a jet that consistently has a 5% advantage over the enemy, it's worth paying big money for, right? I think the loss of productivity due to a lack of specialization probably makes this approach unviable.
8. Why Palmer Avoids Building Humanoids
Taking this to the extreme, for example, I'm building robotic submarines that are specialized in shape to dive to depths of 6,000 meters and stay on the ocean floor for months. I also have other systems that work on the surface. These are robotic installations that drive up to the hills and wait. There are also other things, like aerial vehicles that perform very specialized tasks, and I just can't imagine a convergence that would make sense.
Unless you're saying we're going to get something cool, like humanoid robots with built-in fusion reactors capable of diving to depths of 6,000 feet.
Why don't you build these?
You could potentially build something like that, but you'd quickly realize that specialization would allow you to build something much better. You say, "Okay, I've built something that can dive to the bottom of the ocean and fly to the moon." Man, it could get to the moon a lot faster if it didn't have to dive to the bottom of the ocean.
9. Defense Contractors, Innovation, and Investment
So I think defense is going to be an area where you look at, for example, the difference between cars, where everything has common platforms within the same manufacturer, and they also use a lot of the same standards and interfaces. I think you're comparing it to motorsport, where everything is completely different and everything is constantly moving forward. I think the defense sector will probably always be this weird industry of exotic, highly specialized robotic systems.
Palmer, I expected that if anyone was going to build humanoid robots, it would be you.
No, no, you're wrong. I gave up on it because I believe in them. If I didn't believe that humanoid robotics had such a powerful future, I would probably build them. But I want Anduril to create things that wouldn't otherwise exist. That's what I generally want to do. I want to maximize my marginal impact, but they can do the right thing. All the other people are already doing great.
I want to use their robots and do things with them. I think humanoids will be an incredible common API interface between AI and remote systems, as well as many legacy platforms designed for a human to push a lever, press a button, or read a screen. We will be able to take all of this and automate it without completely replacing it.
You have a lot of things like radar systems that cost millions, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars. No one wants to service them during a heated conflict because they are the first to be hit. But if I can put humanoid robots there, I can automate them without that risk. So, yeah, I won't be building humanoids.
This is also the reason why Anduril doesn't build small impact quadcopters, for example. Too many other companies do this perfectly well. There are many, many industries, and we will not engage in space launches. We create space products. We operate many of our own satellites and many of our own sensors in space, but I don't want to be a launch-service provider. This is for all the other billionaires.
10. Solving Big Global Problems
Palmer, you know, when you run Anduril Industries, you decentralize defense, right? The Pentagon and defense ministries around the world were the most centralized structures in human history. You are on the front lines and dealing with this. You probably have a huge problem with the organizational immune system, where people say, "No, we've done this before. We will do it better." They are either trying to pull you in or push you out.
How do you overcome this barrier? Because you do it in a way that, in my opinion, no one has ever managed to do before.
I think this is a very, very difficult problem at the initial stage. Oh. I said something wrong. Oh, I have no idea what this is. Well, until someone turns on the intercom and tells us someone won a million dollars. Congratulations.
What were we talking about?
Pentagon centralization versus decentralization.
I will keep talking until someone tells me to stop. So we've made some progress on this. I think there was a fear at the beginning that Anduril wouldn't be able to get through this. Our most difficult problem was raising money. Skippy, could you turn that off? I've been to many such meetings, and I know how it works. That's all. I imagine.
One of our early problems was that potential investors would say, "Palmer, listen, we believe you can create things that work. We believe that you can create great products, but we don't believe that the government is capable of buying them on a large scale," because of the centralization. You know about the problems if you're not in the know.
A few years ago, about 80% of MDAPs—the major defense acquisition programs—went to five companies. So, practically everything that matters: 80% of MDAPs was accounted for by five companies, and that's it. We observed incredible consolidation and centralization.
11. Billionaires, Innovation, and Expanding Participation
Anduril has succeeded because we're less of a contractor and more of a product company. We use our own money to build products, then we sell them, and now we've gotten to the point where people in government have really won by betting on Anduril. Somehow, we're completing everything on schedule, on time, and then the next program manager says, "I know how to make my job easier. I just gave the contract to Anduril."
Got it. So it takes courage to enter the defense industry, right? The most nepotistic, closed-off system on the planet. What madness gave you the courage to do that?
It was this madness that made me do this. The first page of our presentation said, “Anduril will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year while earning tens of billions a year.” The idea is that we’re not just building products to sell; we’re replacing systems that unnecessarily cost 10 times more than they should.
And yes, it really seems crazy. I can’t put myself on the same level as him, but one of my mentors and idols in my childhood and early career was John Carmack, the founder of id Software. John is wonderful. John is incredible.
For those who don’t know, he’s actually the inventor of modern 3D game engines and first-person shooters. He also founded a rocket company that competed in the X Prize. He was one of the few, if not the only one, to do a vertical takeoff.
That’s right. He did a vertical takeoff, which no one else had even tried to do.
And I remember the name on the boards of his devices: NVIDIA.
How is that pronounced correctly? I thought only you knew.
That’s right. He built his own sensor-fusion algorithms and processed them on modern commercial graphics hardware, using his experience in game programming.
It was called Armadillo Aerospace.
That’s right. They were doing vertical takeoff and landing long before SpaceX even started doing anything.
Yes, of course—before SpaceX even existed.
12. The Future of AI, Robotics, and Advice for Innovators
Anyway, the point is that he eventually became the CTO of Oculus VR. I managed to lure him away from id, but after he left, he started working on AI even before I did. He founded his own company to work on artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
I said, “Why are you doing this? The chances of success are so low.” To be clear, I still believe that AI is going somewhere, but he said, “I’m going to start a company that’s just going all in for the bottom line. I’m not trying to gradually get to this point. This is simply a bet on general-level AI.”
He emphasized, “Palmer, even if I have a 1% chance of success—which is perhaps an exaggeration, but let’s say I have a 1% chance—and let’s say I can do it, the risk-weighted outcome seems to require me to do this.”
That’s exactly how I felt about the defense sector. If there was a 1% chance that I could help solve this problem, then that would be an extremely important task, unlike starting another gaming company, launching space rockets, or building a car company.
After all, all billionaires end up doing the same thing. We don’t have enough people who are focused on defense or who are putting on the Batman suit. It’s just cars and rockets, and they go in circles like that, over and over again.
The last time I interviewed you for the Moonshots podcast, you mentioned that you were part of a billionaire chat group, a sort of "men's club." Are they working on anything noteworthy at this point? I criticized them and said, “My God, you have so much capital. Solve the world’s biggest problems.”
I think the billionaire guys are doing much better now than they were a few years ago. They’re becoming more active.
For those wondering who we’re talking about, I’ve got a lot of people, especially some retired billionaires. I said to them, “What are you doing? You have so much.” Money is just one of the resources they have, but there’s a resource that people don’t talk about, especially with retired billionaires: their authority.
That authority allows them to rally people, teams, and capital around them. It just lies there doing nothing if they don’t do anything. They have authority because people trust them as leaders capable of leading such an organization.
They can put forward the same ideas and say the same words as someone else who is just as smart or smarter, and they will still achieve more because of who they are. I’m trying to convey to them that they have a responsibility not only as people with significant capital, but also as people with this underutilized resource—the ability to do more.
If you don’t do this, then what do you even do? Anyone can sit on a yacht. Few people can create another multibillion-dollar company that does something truly important.
The good news is that most of them—I think many of them—felt a desire to solve some of the existing problems.
So nihilism is on the decline. We need more "tea boys" than there were "bee boys."
Yes, that’s an interesting point. Although, as I said, most of the "tea boys" seem to be quite busy.
That’s the point.
I don’t even have anything against “B boys” who don’t do enough. Some people misunderstand my words. They say, “Palmer wants other billionaires to work on defense, energy, or biology.”
I don’t mean that people need to be distracted by a bunch of different things. Many people can only do one thing. That’s what I did for a long time. But I can’t stand people who do nothing at all. This is simply disgusting to me.
Maybe a message to the audience: you can join the "B boys" group on Slack or somewhere on Telegram if you’re creating something new and unique. The group was actually shut down, and we’re now discussing whether it’s time to create "B boys 2.0".
I think people were fasting, maybe "B girls" too? I think people have been posting inappropriate memes too often.
Boom.
There was a time when there weren’t any girls there, and then this article came out in Business Insider complaining about it. Really, it was just me and a few guys. This isn’t some Illuminati conference.
They said, “There’s this group, and they don’t invite women there.” I said, “It’s not that women aren’t invited. It’s just me and my friends.” But in the end, there was one girl there.
So yes, we need to restart this. We need to restart that group.
You’re now starring in a Facebook ad.
Yes. I am in a Facebook ad.
VR is already out. How does it relate to the vision you wanted to achieve?
It does a lot of things, but it’s not exactly what I would do if I were the one waving a magic wand.
You have a lot of magic wands spinning around.
Listen, Meta’s new VR headset is much closer in many ways. I’ve long believed that we need to separate the computing unit and battery from the head. It shouldn’t all be on the front of the head.
The Oculus Quest was the last thing I worked on before I got fired. The prototypes at that time were a series codenamed Santa Cruz, and we actually showed them publicly before I was fired.
Santa Cruz had the battery and the computing unit at the back of the head. The lightweight part adjacent to the soft tissues in front was as light as possible. Then, at some point after they got rid of me, they crammed it all into one big, massive unit in the front and ruined the ergonomics. They forgot why the top strap was needed.
This worries me the most. The Oculus Rift CV1, which was the first modern consumer VR headset, had more or less perfect ergonomics back in 2016. We showed it in 2015, and literally no one has done it as well since then. It’s been over 10 years.
Everyone—absolutely everyone—ruins everything, even Apple. I just can’t understand it. How could an ergonomic design led by a 19-year-old with no experience be better than anything anyone has come up with since then?
In any case, the new Meta View glasses are the closest thing to that. It’s very light. They took the computing unit outside, and they took the batteries outside. They have a really high-quality end-to-end video mode.
They also have a feature that I invented for the CV1 called “transformable fabric,” although they don’t call it that. They actually use fabric—a soft, flexible, black matte fabric that absorbs light, first to minimize glare and second to seal the cavity between and around the lenses.
That means the lenses can move, and the fabric simply stretches to accommodate the lens position for different interpupillary distances, instead of using sliding mechanical interfaces and plastic. They brought back transformable fabric for the first time since my time.
So I’m a huge fan. It’s one-third the price of an Apple product and has slightly higher pixel density. I think that’s quite extraordinary. It’s also eight times lighter.
Surprisingly. Quite amazing. Pretty good.
Let’s end on this. We have 1,500 entrepreneurs and visionary innovators, along with tens of thousands of viewers watching live. What is your advice? What did you learn in high school that allowed you to succeed so quickly?
We talked about it on the plane on the way back. I was very lucky—well, I guess I was unlucky. I did it myself.
But you’re really lucky.
That’s right. I am lucky. It’s even in the last name.
I created an online community called ModRetro when I was 14 or 15 years old. It was an online forum for people who modified vintage game consoles and computers, creating portable devices and improving their performance in various ways.
We had several thousand active participants, along with a whole team of volunteer moderators and administrators. For some reason, I was at the head of it all. I learned a lot of valuable lessons about how to build an organization, how to promote it, and how to get people to believe in what you’re doing.
I learned a lot about solving the problems you face when running a company with people. It's a story as old as the world: You have 2 people. They are both brilliant, they are both very good at what they do, and they hate each other.
They disagree about something. You need to somehow resolve the conflict or separate them in a way that benefits them, so that both can contribute to the big project, but so that they don't hate you, lose faith in the common cause, and, of course, kill each other. Sometimes this means you need to reconcile them with each other. Sometimes this means putting one here and another there. Sometimes you have to make sure they don't know you're doing it while you're doing it.
I'm not saying that the key to a successful business is solving the two-fool problem, but once it turns into a three-body problem, then it's a different story. That, like a hundred other things I learned while running ModRetro, came in handy when I started Oculus and in my subsequent work at other companies.
That's why I firmly believe that children should find jobs. I started working myself at 14, so I also learned how the real world works. I'm a big fan of people doing things on a scale bigger than themselves. In other words, don't just do a project; do it with someone else. Do projects together with other people. Create openly, and learn the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.
This was extremely helpful to me.
Has creating anything changed in the age of AI? What is your advice? As we've been saying on the podcast for a long time: forget about a master's degree, and even college is another question. You didn't go to college. Do you know what high school students should do?
Find something you love and use AI to program it. What is your final advice on this?
One of the reasons I'm not as upset as some people are is that—
It's funny. Something appeared on the screen. It's not that we don't want to talk about anything. I just wanted to make sure you saw this.
Yes, I saw it.
We won't talk about it. Don't think about it. Elephant.
Okay, great. There are many people who love their job and love what they do. They quite rightly mourn the end of the era when, for example, code was written by hand, from start to finish, as a true craft. I understand that.
It's the same feeling that many artists had when the camera was invented. They whined and complained that it ruined the art by allowing anyone to just press a button, and such changes are always painful for masters of their craft.
I've been burned by this for a long time. When you're a founder, you don't work directly with technology anyway. Everyone else is enjoying themselves. I like electrical engineering, optics, and mechanical engineering.
I don't do any of that, because the founder's job is to hire people to replace you and do what you thought you could do yourself, or what they do better than you. I often tell people: If you want to work with technology, work for someone else. If you want to constantly deal with nonsense, start a company.
AI doesn't really change much in the part of the job where there's a lot of nonsense. You are still legally responsible. You are still responsible for all interpersonal matters. You can delegate some things, but ultimately the decision is yours. It's your choice.
The same applies to attracting investment. The same goes for the overall product architecture. When people make bad decisions, it's you who chooses when to undo, change, or replace those people.
I don't see AI replacing this part of the job anytime soon. Not because it can't, but because the efficiency gains in other areas are so much greater that we'll have a good 10 years of accelerated development of all other business processes before it's time for this.
So, listen, AI is changing a lot of things, but I'm telling you: a lot of you are in for a bitter disappointment if you're an amateur programmer or an amateur engineer and you think you're going to start a company and do it all by yourself. No. A harsh lesson awaits you.
Being a founder has always felt like AI took your job. It was just taken away by other people.
Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, let's give Palmer Luckey a round of applause.