Peter Diamandis On XPRIZE, Bitcoin, AI And The Future Of Humanity
Credits: Anna Tutova(Founder AI Crypto Minds) with Peter Diamandis(Founder XPRIZE Foundation).
In this interview with Peter Diamandis, visionary futurist, serial entrepreneur, best known, as Founder of the XPRIZE Foundation, co-Founder and executive chairman of Singularity University, named by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders”, we delved into the inspiration behind the renowned XPRIZE initiative. Peter reflects on his frustration with the limited avenues for private space exploration in the early ’90s, leading to the creation of XPRIZE to incentivize groundbreaking endeavors. Over the years, XPRIZE has evolved to address grand challenges across various fields, from space and ocean exploration to education and healthcare. Peter emphasizes the importance of incentivizing entrepreneurs to tackle ambitious endeavors and shift focus from mundane pursuits to transformative innovations. The conversation delves into Peter’s vision for extending the healthy human lifespan and explores his thoughts on emerging technologies, including blockchain and AI. Peter discusses his beliefs in Bitcoin as a transformative force and its potential to empower individuals.
Anna Tutova: Your main baby is probably XPRIZE. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind it?
Peter Diamandis: Yeah, so the XPRIZE began really from my personal frustration of wanting to get to space. And I realized that unless you are a government astronaut (this is back in the early nineties) your chance of becoming an astronaut was very low. And so, I read that Lindbergh in 1927 crossed the Atlantic to win a prize and said: «I’m going to create a prize for private spaceflight». And it worked. It took a decade to go from the original idea to being one, but it kicked off the commercial spaceflight industry, suborbital flights and then created the regulatory regime and attracted people to the field. And since then, we’ve launched about $300 million of XPRIZEs, prizes to map the ocean floor, to pull water out of the atmosphere of CO2, for teaching kids in the middle of no place reading, writing and arithmetic without adults, without schools. We just launched XPRIZE to detect and put out wildfires autonomously.
We launched over half a $1 billion of prizes, including the $100M Carbon Removal XPRIZE, funded by Elon Musk and Musk Foundation (awarded in 2025) and the $101M Healthspan XPRIZE (announced 2023). So, it’s really about incentivizing entrepreneurs to try and take on bigger moonshots.
One of my missions is: can I incentivize people to think bigger?
I don’t want people to build another photo sharing app. Go and cure one of a disease, go and transform food, water, energy, health care, education, because you can.
Anna: What are other issues you see, which you’d like to address and make another competition for XPRIZE?
I’m looking at XPRIZEs in areas like happiness. Can we build technology to detect when we are happy, and can we run experiments to maximize happiness? I’m looking at XPRIZEs for earthquake prediction, XPRIZEs for detecting asteroids and deflecting them.
There’s a multitude of grand challenges. One of my AI XPRIZEs, I’m excited about, that we’re developing is: can you build a system that can allow you to reliably communicate two ways with animals.
We look at prizes in food and water, and healthcare and education, in space exploration and ocean exploration. What is an area that isn’t moving fast enough, where a prize would incentivize people? One of the big areas I’m focused on is extending the healthy human lifespan.
Anna: On your Twitter, you put the question: «What will you create, where will you explore, and how will you spend your time if you are able to add an additional 40 healthy years to your life?». So, the …
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