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Moonshots · 4 min · Oct 17, 2026

XPRIZE can surface teams investors would overlook

Salim Ismail

Founder, Open ExO

Co-wrote Exponential Organizations; was Singularity University's founding executive director; sold Ångströ to Google.

  • Peter DiamandisHost · Founder, XPRIZE

    Co-founded Singularity University and founded Zero-G; co-wrote the books Abundance and Bold.

About this segment

An oil-spill cleanup prize drew an unlikely second-place team: a dentist and a tattoo artist. Prizes can support solutions where markets and governments aren't investing.

From “Flying Tesla Car, Robot Brains Halving in Cost Every 3 Weeks, and Why Incentives Decide AI Alignment”, Oct 17, 2026. Watch the full episode

“if that team walked into your office looking for funding, you're never getting the money.”
Salim Ismailat 47:18 · Moonshots47:18

Takeaways

  1. The cleanup prize drew 350 teams and tested 10 solutions.
  2. A dentist and tattoo artist built a second-place entry.
  3. Prizes can fund research where markets and governments fall short.
Watch 3:53 from 45:42

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 17:27Robot task costs fell 84% in two months6:51
  2. 36:11Prizes reward solving the problem, not credentials6:23
  3. 1:08:39AI alignment starts with what models learn6:32
  4. 29:18GPT-6 handled research-level physics problems for about $3 each5:57
  5. 1:15:08AI labs should teach values from the start5:24

  6. 45:42XPRIZE can surface teams investors would overlook3:53

  7. 52:28The organ-preservation prize targets six-month storage2:18Up next
  8. 1:27:24The Abundance Prize targets $1,000 monthly essentials for a family3:17

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 45:48

    And we had the oil spill cleanup prize, one of my favorite stories, and yours, Salim. I'll tee it up, but you can add on. So back when the BP oil spill was going on in the Gulf of Mexico, it was just like oil was gushing, and it was heading towards the beaches. It was going to destroy the beaches there. James Cameron was on our board back then, and he said, you've got to do something about it. You've got to do an emergency X-Prize.

  2. 46:13

    And we actually did not to plug the oil well, but to reinvent how we cleaned up oil on the ocean surface. And we put out an email to all of our board and Eric Schmidt, Wendy Schmidt raised their hands and said, we want to do this. And the goal was, could you double the oil spill cleanup rate? And we had teams around the world, like 350 teams enter this competition. And we selected 10 of them that to ship their solution in shipping containers to Omset, New Jersey, the largest oil spill cleanup.

  3. 46:51

    Yes, there's an oil spill cleanup testing facility there. And then Salim, you want to take the rest of the story here? Yeah, sure. So the second place team, right, is a dentist and a tattoo artist that literally meet because the dentist is getting a tattoo, I think, in Las Vegas. Las Vegas, yes. And the tattoo guy turns out to be an environmentalist. I was talking about this prize. The dentist goes, I know a lot about bonding agents in liquid.

  4. 47:14

    And they're like, oh, so they get together, form a team, test it in his hot tub, or is it in his hot tub? And then they came in second place. And the reason that's such a magical story is that if that team walked into your office looking for funding, you're never getting the money. They've never met. They have no experience. I don't know the domain, et cetera, et cetera. And yet they came in second place because you just never know.

  5. 47:36

    And the second part of the thing, that whole project that I found fascinating is where an XPRIZE is really valuable is where governments aren't doing enough and markets aren't doing enough, right? And in this case, there's no economic incentive to do R&D on oil cleanup technology. And it's a perfect place for a prize. I thought that was wonderful. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think the reason we see this over and over is this crowdsourcing solutions.

  6. 48:03

    The fact that you have diverse set of ideas and they're not bound by a set of belief system that stops them from imagining something different. This is where the beginner's mind comes in so important for all of these folks that are doing disruptive innovation. Elon had no experience in the car industry or the space industry, and yet market leaders in all of them. Yeah, well, I think, again, like you've just had visioneering, but the process that comes after visioneering is actually one of the most important ones, right?

  7. 48:29

    Absolutely. Where you take that target and you make it, again, just very, very, very actionable. Yeah, the price design process. And we typically get, you know, hundreds or thousands of teams aiming at it. Sometimes they fall away. Sometimes they merge. Yeah. And it may not be the winner who's the commercially viable solution at the end. It may be, you know, second, third, fourth. But we're cultivating a new industry.

  8. 48:53

    Iman, the first time I met you was you were on, you were heading a team on the team on the Global Learning XPRIZE. Yeah, kind of working around that. And, I mean, it just brings people from all sorts of backgrounds, right, together. Because, again, I think it's personal. Like, you want this to succeed, be it from the prize side to the other. But it needs that coordinating factor to bring it together.

  9. 49:16

    And I think now, again, you've got the people. you have the capability but now with the technology from robotics to ai yeah you can make a bigger difference than almost ever yeah i think a lot of our prizes are going to be just that um i mean so