AT Astro Teller On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

“If someone came to you and said, I want to pitch you my company, are you ready for my pitch? We use electricity. You would think I was nuts. … That's an implementation detail. What are you doing? I feel the same way about AI. I actually try to say AI as little as possible.”

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“If someone came to you and said, I want to pitch you my company, are you ready for my pitch? We use electricity. You would think I was nuts. … That's an implementation detail. What are you doing? I feel the same way about AI. I actually try to say AI as little as possible.” — Astro Teller, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

One of the hosts asked whether X has started swapping people and money for AI and compute. Teller said yes, then went on what he called a side rant about how AI gets pitched. He mentioned that his own PhD was in artificial intelligence.

Transcript

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis Around 24:42 into the episode
Peter Diamandis

Dave, you were going to say.

Dave Blundin

I'd like to take your exact quote and say, look, you know, if you, hey, dirty little secret, everybody, doing a moonshot is really, really easy. You take fanatically focused people who care about a mission, who are really, really smart, and you pour money on them. Great. No CEO Will be a world where you swap out the people and you swap in AGIs, and you take out the money and you pour compute on them. That world isn't here yet. There's got to be some transition world we're in right now where there are three AIs and three people, and I poured compute and money on them. And then there's another ratio. Have you started down that journey yet?

Astro Teller

Totally. I mean, all right. I'm going to connect your question to like a side rant. On the one hand, if someone came to you and said, I want to pitch you my company, are you ready for my pitch? We use electricity. You would think I was nuts. Like, on the one hand, you'd be frightened if I didn't use electricity in my business, but you'd be like, so what? That's an implementation detail. What are you doing? I feel the same way about AI. I actually try to say AI as little as possible because it's driving me crazy the way I say SI now, super intelligence. Sorry, I got a PhD 30 years ago in artificial intelligence, so a little stuck on that one, Dave.

Dave Blundin

Me too.

Astro Teller

On the one hand, like what you just described, every one of our moonshots, that's it. It's a bunch of agents and a bunch of people working together to try to solve a problem. That's an implementation detail. What we're obsessed with is the problem. Whether it's clean water or it's a way to make grid-scale energy storage or it's education, whether it's how to fix the electric grid, how to make our world sort of actually circular so we're not sending trillions of dollars a year to landfill. Like those are the things that we're obsessed about. And then in the background, yeah, it's humans and agents like making it happen. But most of our obsession is the problem and how to couple that into a business so that it gets bigger over time so it doesn't cost too much.

Dave Blundin

Let me translate that into a budget question. So if you said, here, clean water is a great one, great moonshot. I need, what was it, like a penny a liter?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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