Palmer Luckey’s eyes light up and he talks at top speed as he discusses his company’s new recruiting event: the AI Grand Prix.
This is a drone flying competition with a twist. Rather than humans piloting drones, they must operate autonomously. Humans will be tested on their skills in writing software that allows drones to outperform their competitors.
There are prizes ranging from a $500,000 prize pool to be distributed to top-performing teams, to jobs at Anduril and a chance to bypass the company’s standard recruiting cycle.
“This is something I decided we should do,” Anduril founder Luckey said in an interview with TechCrunch. Luckey and the team would meet to discuss recruiting strategy, he recalls.
Someone suggested sponsoring a drone racing tournament, which was somewhat in line with the company’s previous marketing tactics. For example, Anduril sponsors the NASCAR Cup Series race known as 250 on the sensor.
Luckey generally liked the idea, but then said, “‘Guys, that would be a really stupid thing for Anduril to sponsor. The bottom line, our impetus and our reason for being, is that autonomy has finally progressed to where you don’t need a person to micromanage every drone,'” he recalled, then adding, “‘What we should really do is sponsor a race that’s about the ability of programmers and engineers to fly a drone alone.'”
After discovering that such an event did not exist, the company chose to create it itself. Interestingly, Luckey emphasized that the teams participating in the AI Grand Prix will not be piloting Anduril’s drones, but those built by another defense tech startup: Neros Technologies. According to Luckey, Anduril’s drones are too physically large to operate on the confined Ohio course where the final will take place.
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“We’ve talked about having teams use Anduril drones, but Anduril doesn’t make super-high-speed, super-small drones like you’d want for a Drone Racing League. It’s mostly bigger stuff,” he said.
Anduril is also partnering with one of the established racing leagues, the Drone Champions League, to host the event, as well as JobsOhio. The final race will take place in Ohio (where Anduril’s key manufacturing plant is located).
Although Luckey is clearly excited about the fun of the event, he won’t be a runner himself. “I will definitely be there,” he says, but “it will be about who can create the best software to fly these drones.”
He smiled and said, “Actually, I’m not a very good software programmer. I’m more of a hardware specialist. I’m an electromechanics and optics specialist, and I know just enough about coding to glue things together in a way that works for my prototypes.”
(Luckey calls Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf “our de facto main software brain” at the company.)
The founder hopes to form at least 50 teams and is already attracting interest from several universities, he said. If this competition proves successful, it is planned to extend it to races with other types of autonomous vehicles.
“We are starting with these quadcopter racing drones, which is what people expect from drone racing. However, in the future we want to apply AI racing to other platforms as well,” he said.
Underwater AI races, ground AI races, and potentially even spaceship AI races were some of the ideas Luckey shared.
The competition is open to all international teams, excluding Russian teams.
“The difference with Russia is that it is actively engaged in invading Europe,” he said.
The problem is that people qualified to participate in such a race could also work for their country’s military. “I would love to have everyone, but we are not the Olympics,” he added.
Luckey said the event followed the example of the World Cup, which also excluded Russia.
Interestingly, teams from China (home to many autonomous engineering companies) are welcome, although this is the country that American hawks on autonomous weapons are often cited as their greatest fear.
If a Chinese team won, the price of a job at Anduril, which makes weapons used by the U.S. military, would not be a given. “If you work for the Chinese military, you will not be allowed to get a job in Anduril,” Luckey said. Certain laws apply, he stressed. In fact, there will still be interviews and a qualification process for all candidates.
The competition will take place over three qualifying rounds starting in April with the final Grand Prix race scheduled for November.
