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

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We're about to award the Build with Gemini X Prize. 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 A W G, 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.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  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 X 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

• 1:27Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back to the stage Palmer Lucky.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  Hey, buddy, you're back. Palmer's back, everybody. You know something about building companies? Okay, our next judge is...

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Kathy Wood, CEO and CIO of investment management firm Arc Invest.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  We now have risk averse investors, certainly in the institutional world, less so in the retail world.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Please welcome to the stage, the legendary Kathy Wood.

• 2:49Speaker 00

  It's Kathy Wood, everybody. Hi Kathy, good morning. Please. Kathy just flew in from Portugal last night for this. Thank you so much, Kathy. All right, our next judge.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Logan Kilpatrick.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Logan Kilpatrick, product lead for Google AI Studio and the Gemini API at Google DeepMind.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  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 for firsthand. There's like so much subtle subtlety in getting that right, and the model crushed it.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Logan Kilpatrick.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  Logan. Logan, thank you so much, and thank you to Gemini for your support on this. All right, our final judge.

• 4:03Speaker 06

  Founder and CEO Mark Pincus joins us now. He's a serial tech entrepreneur and investor, best known as the founder of Zynga.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  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, [BLEEP] 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.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Welcome to the stage, the amazing Mark Pincus.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  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. Can move it along, keep time. 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 teams, but let me turn it over to you.

• 5:12Speaker 05

  I love it. Awesome. Peter, we're starting with questions around, do we still want to start with questions around...

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, let me, actually, it'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? Right? You're just graduated school, you know, some bet you made wiped you out, you got to start again, didn't have your network, didn't have your wealth. What would you do today? Palmer?

• 6:00Speaker 07

  Tried to end...

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Tess? Yeah.

• 6:04Speaker 07

  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 is definitely fine.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  So, 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...

• 6:36Speaker 07

  Safe, it's understood. We use it on mothers and infants who have...

• 6:39Speaker 00

  It's the bonding hormone.

• 6:40Speaker 07

  That's right. It's the mammal pair bonding chemical. There's things you can do to increase the uptake, and there's, 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.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  I can't.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Mark, you in on that one?

• 7:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I couldn't use that like eight years ago.

• 7:12Speaker 07

  It's never too late. Call her up.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  But I find that absolutely fascinating. 50% divorce rate.

• 7:17Speaker 07

  Say, maybe I just made an order from Sigma Aldrich Chemical Supply. I think we need to, we need to talk.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  All right. I love, I love that. It's, it's, and it's bio, 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, for women who don't bond with their husbands.

• 7:36Speaker 07

  And it's also, you know, and it's also used for, for kids with various neurological issues, some kids with autism who struggle with perineal. And 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, it unburdens you from a chemical dependency.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  What inspired that idea, by the way? I mean, you're happily...

• 8:01Speaker 07

  Just obsession with natalism and the birth rate in America.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  Amazing, amazing. Kathy, beat that one.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  You're going to have to repeat the question.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  So the question, 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?

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Oh, what area?

• 8:27Speaker 00

  Or, or what company would you start? Or, you know, give us a...

• 8:32Speaker 03

  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. 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, isn't this going to be terrible? I think we're going to have an entrepreneurial explosion. So I, I say, and I, I know I'm singing your song here, Peter. So I, I just say to these young kids, because, you know, it is true, entry-level jobs are,

• 9:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Or even better, your company takes off and you tell them to go away.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Well, you know, that's what I, that's exactly. But you have to be realistic. So 90% of all startups fail, but 10% succeed. So you absolutely are right that that is the call option.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Do you think that number is changing in the era of AI of success rates?

• 10:19Speaker 03

  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. So I'd probably suggest to people who have any interest in healthcare biology

• 11:04Speaker 03

  to go there and go there with AI.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Perfect. Logan, what's your answer?

• 11:10Speaker 05

  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 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-risked 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 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

• 11:54Speaker 05

  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 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.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Aggregate unique data and then sell that package.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Mark, so curious to hear what you're going to say.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  At the risk of sounding really obvious of what you'd expect me to say, I'll do it anyway. I would, 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.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Palmer, you agree?

• 13:03Speaker 04

  And I feel like as one of the like 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.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  Palmer, you're nodding your head.

• 13:31Speaker 07

  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 and kind of the unintentional, just like, you know, endless scrolling, doom scrolling side of things. You know, as a guy who grew up on PHP 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.

• 14:15Speaker 07

  And you know, that's, that, that, that stuff is good. So I think the more that we could shift from the crappy stuff to the high calorie stuff.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I, 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.

• 14:40Speaker 08

  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, 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. Myfixam, 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.

• 15:22Speaker 08

  And Tish and 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.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 15:44Speaker 04

  Do you have one of those gigantic checks?

• 15:46Speaker 00

  We do.

• 15:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, we got a, we got a bunch. That's my job.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  Okay. Are you guys ready?

• 15:54Speaker 05

  In fifth first, I think we're starting.

• 15:55Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, yes. We're going to start with the fifth place. The fifth place winner is Dodo Prep.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  Come on out, Dodo Prep.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  Oh, he can't.

• 16:13Speaker 05

  Joining us through the internet.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Through the internet. And by the way, if I could take a second, we have the Oscar of optimism here, which our incredible designer Joel Cave produced, designed, manufactured. It's gorgeous. It's like, I want one. Okay.

• 16:37Speaker 05

  I love it.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  So.

• 16:39Speaker 05

  Naveed.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Naveed, congratulations. You're getting a check for $100,000.

• 16:46Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  And this trophy, which we will send to you.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Congratulations, Naveed.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Thank you, Naveed.

• 16:56Speaker 09

  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

• 16:59Speaker 05

  And we're mailing it to India.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Okay, in fourth place.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  In fourth place, Launchbridge.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  Come on out, Launchbridge.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Congratulations.

• 17:18Speaker 05

  Congrats, guys.

• 17:19Speaker 04

  Congratulations.

• 17:20Speaker 05

  We're going to do photos. Yep. There we go. Peter, I'll be in there.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Come on, Dan.

• 17:27Speaker 05

  This is your Oscar.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  And your trophy, and the trophy. Where's the trophy?

• 17:34Speaker 03

  The trophy is right here.

• 17:34Speaker 05

  Trophy is over there.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  You got it? Okay. Enjoy, gentlemen.

• 17:38Speaker 05

  Congrats, guys.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  I hope this investment goes far for you.

• 17:42Speaker 05

  Congrats, guys.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  Okay, are you guys ready? In third place, Myfixam.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Come on out, Myfixam.

• 17:58Speaker 05

  Congratulations. Go, there you go.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Please.

• 18:02Speaker 05

  Congratulations.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  Come on in the middle. Come in the middle.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Congratulations. We hope this goes far in making Myfixam dominate. A pleasure. Congratulations.

• 18:20Speaker 05

  Congrats, guys.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Before announcing the second and first place, we want both teams to come on.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Yes, both teams should come on out.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Because it's kind of obvious once you announce second place and first place is.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Yes, Tishian, Sierra, and Polyfork, please join us on stage.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  So, so stand on up. And Tishian is on Zoom.

• 18:52Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Can we see? Hopefully, he's still around.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Here he is.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  All right.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Edgar.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  Edgar.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  One of you is second, one of you is first.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Okay, I need drum roll. Come on.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Okay. The second place winner is Tishian Sierra.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Bring out the checks.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  Congratulations. How you can hire you?

• 19:30Speaker 05

  That's crazy. Look at this.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  All right, Tishian, Edgar, congratulations. You have won $200,000. I don't know what that is in pesos, but congratulations nonetheless. And yeah, awesome.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Come on out, my friend. First of all, look at this trophy.

• 19:58Speaker 05

  Congratulations.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  It's a beautiful trophy. And $500,000. Congratulations.

• 20:06Speaker 07

  Thank you so much.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  Non-dilutive seed capital. It's the best kind.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  That'll get diluted by taxes.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  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, can I get a quick photo with you guys?

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