Palmer Luckey’s eyes light up and he talks a mile a minute when discussing his company’s new recruiting event: AI Grand Prix.
This is a drone flying competition with a twist. Instead of humans operating drones, drones should operate autonomously. People will be tested on their skills in writing software that makes drones outperform their competition.
There are prizes ranging from a $500,000 pot to be shared among the highest-scoring teams, to jobs at Anduril and a chance to skip the company’s typical hiring cycle.
“It was something I decided to do,” Anduril founder Luckey told TechCrunch. Lackey 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 past marketing tactics. For example, Anduril sponsors the NASCAR Cup Series race known as the Anduril 250.
Luckey generally liked the idea, but then said, “Guys, it would be really stupid for Anduril to sponsor. The whole thing, our whole drive and raison d’être, is this step that autonomy has finally progressed to where you don’t have to have a person micromanaging every drone,” he recalls, adding, “What we have to do is the engines and the race sponsors. The drone flies itself.”
After discovering that such an event did not exist, the company chose to create it on its own. However, interestingly, Luckey pointed out that the teams at the AI Grand Prix will not be flying Anduril’s drones, but ones made by another defense tech startup: Neros Technologies. According to Luckey, Anduril’s drones are too large to run on the limited course in Ohio where the finals will be held.
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“We’ve talked about teams using Anduril drones, but Anduril doesn’t make any drones that are of the ultra-high-speed, ultra-small nature that 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 operate the event, as well as JobsOhio. The final race will be held in Ohio (where Anduril’s main production facility is located).
While Luckey is clearly excited about how much fun the event will be, he won’t be the same runner. “I’ll definitely be there,” he says, but “it’s going to be about who can build the best software to fly those drones.”
He smiled and said, “I’m not really a very good software developer. I’m more of a hardware guy. I’m an electrical and visual guy, and I know enough about coding to glue things together in a way that works for my prototypes.”
(Lucky calls Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf “our de facto top software brains” at the company.)
The founder hopes for at least 50 teams and already has interest from several universities, he said. If this competition is successful, the plan is to expand to racing other types of autonomous vehicles.
“We’re starting with these quadcopter racing drones, which is what people expect from drone racing. However, we want to implement AI racing on other platforms in the future,” he said.
Underwater AI races, land-based AI races, possibly even spaceship AI races were some of the ideas shared by Luckey.
The competition is open to all international teams outside of Russia.
“The difference with Russia is that they are actively participating in the act of invading Europe,” he said.
The concern is that people who are fit to join such a fight may also be working for their nation’s military. “I’d love to have everybody, but we’re not the Olympics,” he added.
Lackey said the event was following a lead from the World Cup, which has also excluded Russia.
Interestingly, teams from China (home of many autonomous engineers) are welcome, despite being the country that US autonomous weapons hawks often cite as their greatest fear.
If a Chinese team wins, the prize of a job at Anduril, which makes weapons used by the US military, would not be a foregone conclusion. “If you work for the Chinese military, you will not be allowed to get a job at Anduril,” Luckey said. Certain laws apply, he pointed out. In fact, there will still be an interview and qualification process for all job applicants.
The competition will be held in three qualifying rounds starting in April with the final Grand Prix race scheduled for November.
