Palmer Luckey

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · Palmer Luckey: Autonomous Weapons Are Ancient and Why Anduril…

• Why Won't Anduril Build Humanoids?

  Palmer Luckey says Anduril will not build humanoids because he believes they have a powerful future. If he did not believe that, he says he would probably build them. He wants Anduril to build things that would not otherwise exist, and he agrees with Peter Diamandis that the aim is to maximize marginal impact.

  Alexander Wissner-Gross asks whether Anduril's robots will converge on one general-purpose machine, the way general models handle many tasks. Palmer Luckey says no on the defense side. Manufacturing, hospitality, and medicine might share one form, because each of them gets real economies of scale. Defense does not. He builds robot submarines that dive to 6,000 meters and sit on the oc

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• How Long Have Autonomous Weapons Existed?

  Palmer Luckey says autonomous weapons have existed for thousands of years. He defines them as weapons that carry out what you program them to do, independent of the operator or the engineer, and he says a new set of technology is only making them better.

  Dave Blundin asks who unleashes the weapons if drones fly instead of pilots, and whether that call is made on the aircraft or sent back to headquarters. Palmer Luckey says the change is not as large as people think. Weapons have been making their own kill decisions for decades. The Aegis system on destroyers has a fully autonomous mode. Flip a button and it shoots down anything inside a programmed range, with no human confirmation. CIWS and

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• What Is Mod Retro?

  Palmer Luckey says Mod Retro is an online community he started when he was 14 or 15. It was an internet forum for people who modified vintage game consoles and computers, built handheld units, and improved their performance. A few thousand members were active, with volunteer moderators and administrators and him at the top. Running it taught him how to build an organization, market it, and get people to believe in the work.

  The problems were the ones that show up when you run a company. Two people can both be brilliant and very good at what they do, and still hate each other and disagree. He had to mediate the conflict or separate them so both could contribute value, without them hating him

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• Why Has No Headset Matched the Oculus Rift?

  Palmer Luckey says no headset has matched the Oculus Rift CV1, the first modern consumer virtual reality headset, because it got the ergonomics more or less perfect in 2016, and literally nobody has done as well since, even Apple. The team was already showing it off in 2015. He cannot comprehend how the ergonomic design led by a 19 year old kid with no experience is still better than anything anyone has come up with since, and it has been over a decade.

  He has long believed the compute and the battery should come off the front of the head. Oculus Quest was the last thing he worked on before he was fired. Prototypes codenamed Santa Cruz put the battery and compute on the back of the head and

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• Why Has Anduril Been Successful?

  Palmer Luckey says Anduril has been successful because the company is less of a contractor and more of a product company. Anduril uses its own money to build products, then sells them.

  Salim Ismail asks how Palmer Luckey navigates the Pentagon, which Salim Ismail calls the most centralized entity in the history of humanity, when people inside it try to suck Anduril in or spit it out. Early potential investors told Palmer Luckey they believed he could build things that work and products that are great, but they did not believe the government was capable of purchasing them at scale. Until just a few years ago, about 80 percent of major defense acquisition programs went to five companies. Peop

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• What XPRIZE Is Palmer Luckey Funding?

  Palmer Luckey is funding a new XPRIZE that Peter Diamandis says will be announced in a month. It is another $10 million prize. The details stay secret until then because Palmer Luckey says there are good twists.

  Palmer Luckey is not interested in spending his money to push AI forward. He says the model side of artificial intelligence is already well covered, and not enough work has gone into biological intelligence beyond people. The prize is about understanding how animals think and communicating with them 10 times better than today's state of the art for the smartest species. The aim is wild animals in their own language, not only trained animals. Large language models distill how humans

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