Google X's Astro Teller: The $1B Bet No CEO Will Back, Moonshots 3x Cheaper in 16 Yrs, and Clean Water at 1¢/L| EP #300

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

In this episode, Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X, breaks down the rigorous methodology behind building breakthrough technologies, emphasizing the necessity of pairing extreme audacity with

Key takeaways

• Astro Teller defines a moonshot as requiring three components: a massive world problem, a science-fiction-level solution, and a breakthrough technology with at least a minimal chance of success.
• X starts 1 to 200 ideas per year that earn code names, but only graduates approximately two projects annually after five to six years of development.

Main topics

• Moonshot methodology and hypothesis testing
• R&D cost deflation and efficiency metrics

Notable quotes

"I am like the crown prince of failure, but it's not because I like to fail. It's because you learn nothing when you're right."

Conclusion

The episode delivers a highly actionable framework for institutionalizing radical

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:05) Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure, Speaker 4 (0:07) pal. And we've known each other for, God knows, a couple of decades now. Speaker 5 (0:11) You know, I think most people don't know something about you. It's worth mentioning. Just for fun, since we're talking about genetics, his maternal grandfather was a Nobel laureate in economics, and his paternal grandfather was Edward Teller, the creator of the hydrogen bomb. It's a pretty interesting fact. No Speaker 2 (0:32) pressure. Speaker 5 (0:32) No pressure. It was a high-pressure childhood, yes. Yeah, I guess so. So let me kick off the first question. So you've been in the moonshot business for over 20 years. Walk us through your advice of what it actually takes to come up with a moonshot and launch a moonshot. You know, how do you make this real? We've got a lot of individuals here who are here because they believe in optimism. They believe in moonshots. You know, in 10 seconds. No, just kidding. What's your Speaker 4 (1:07) advice? I mean, you've learned so much. Let me give you two quick things. The first one is let's just define moonshot, at least how we think of a moonshot. Which is how I think of it as well. Excellent. I've learned from you. So three basic components. First, there has to be a huge problem with the world that you can name and you want to solve. If you can't name the huge problem, then it's arguably an academic exercise. Second, there has to be some kind of science fiction sounding product or service that no matter how unlikely it is you could make it, we could pre-agree that if you made that science fiction sounding product or service, it would resolve that huge problem with the world. And then three, there has to be some kind of breakthrough technology that gives us a prayer, at least a tiny chance at minimum, of being able to make that science fiction sounding product or service and resolving that huge problem with the world. When you have that, we would call that a moonshot story hypothesis. That does not mean you're gonna win, but it at least means it's testable. The second thing I would say is one of the fundamental issues that we found at X is that you have to have two things in equal amounts in order to be a moonshot explorer, to be a moonshot team. The first one is you have to have very high audacity. You have to be willing to suspend your disbelief for non-stupid reasons and go on unlikely journeys that might actually profoundly help the world. But the second thing you have to have in equal measure is humility. You have to know from the first moment you set out on that unlikely journey that it's unlikely. Because if you don't, you will go ruinously far down that path before you find out that that is one of the 99 % that just isn't going to work out. So being able to say right at the beginning, I'm proud that I'm trying this, but it probably won't work. Let me learn as fast and as cheaply as I can whether this is even possible allows you to get onto the next moonshot when that moonshot's not the right one to do. Speaker 1 (3:15) So Speaker 4 (3:16) your advice for folks, Speaker 5 (3:17) I mean... The challenge of picking a moonshot, I mean, right now, the speed at which you can test things, create things, right? But what about the beginning, choosing the idea? Any advice there? Speaker 4 (3:30) Well, put it this way. What do you do to shut down an idea quickly? So sometimes the idea is just not big enough. Sometimes the idea is too reasonable or likely to succeed. Sometimes it's just not good for the world or the potential for too many sort of secondary problems associated with it is just too high. Often it's techno-economics. I cannot tell you the number of moonshots that feel so good to people in their early days. Often these are very technical people. And it's not until you say, really? Like, let's go step by step. What is the best case scenario for the build of materials that you would make this from? What is, like, just the raw cost in weight of the stuff that would go into that? What are people really going to pay? Could this even plausibly... Speaker 5 (4:25) Zero, you know, what does Elon call it? First principle Speaker 4 (4:29) thinking in that regard. Right, first principles thinking about the techno-economics. You can often kill moonshots in the very early days because it's just not going to turn into an enduring business. And at least what I believe is that purpose and profit can support each other. And then if you're doing something that's going to lose money, it's probably not going to change the world. Yeah. Dave? Speaker 1 (4:50) Yeah, I'm really curious about, you know, Alex and Peter have this Solve Everything book, which is phenomenal, but the rate at which physics and material science, chemistry is going to change, just astronomically accelerating. So when you joined Google, what, 25, 23 years ago? How long ago? 16 and a half years ago. I co-founded Speaker 4 (5:12) X, 16 and a half years ago. 16 and Speaker 1 (5:13) a half years ago, okay. And at the time it was about a $30 billion? company? Ish, yes. Speaker 4 (5:17) It was very sweet. It was very small back then. Very tiny Speaker 1 (5:20) little $30 billion company. Now, just about half a trillion dollar company. So the scale of R &D in a corporate environment like that has grown miraculously, just absolutely tremendously. And I think you were saying backstage that the ideal target for a new idea, 100 ideas a year. Two of them succeed? That's right. We Speaker 4 (5:40) start 1 to 200 ideas a year that make it far enough that they end up with a code name. Who knows how many we actually look at. But 1 to 200 ideas a year that make it far enough we get a code name. Of those, about five to six years later, we graduate two moonshots out of X. Wow. Speaker 1 (5:57) So 2 % hit rate. And so then if AGI is imminent and the idea rate goes astronomically, right? Does that grow on that same exponential curve? Just the number of things at the front of the funnel go from 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 to... Speaker 4 (6:13) Oh, for sure. I mean, there's no shortage of problems with the world. There's no shortage of creative ideas for running at those problems. I think AI is going to somewhat shrink that time from a crazy idea to us having de-risked it to the point where we can say... definitively, here's evidence it's not a crazy idea anymore, so that's getting shorter. I hope that AI is going to let us raise our audacity even higher, so we'll be shooting higher, and so we'll be able to do more in a shorter amount of time. But fundamentally, I think the structure will be the same. I think, Speaker 1 (6:45) if you asked me three years ago, what are the big things that came out of X, Waymo is at the top of the list. Google Brain. Yeah, Speaker 2 (6:55) but Speaker 1 (6:55) now, so I was going to ask about it. So Google Brain was probably like, yeah, this is cool up until some point a couple years ago when it was like, no, this is the entire future of Google now. Speaker 4 (7:06) You guys just spent 80 % of the last three hours talking about the stuff that arguably Google Brain sort of birthed. What Speaker 5 (7:13) is Google Brain? Define it because we know DeepMind, but we don't know Google Speaker 4 (7:17) Brain. So Google Brain, which started at X, 15 and a half years ago or so, it was one of the earliest things that we started. At the time, there were a set of academics who were kind of out of vogue. This was like Andrew Ng, Jan LeCun, a few others, who were saying, I think scale might matter. And neural nets were absolutely dead in the field at the time. And they're saying, I think scale might matter and it might actually bring neural networks back. And everyone else in the field said, nope, you're crazy. Andrew Ng came to... Google X at the time and we set up what was called Google Brain with Jeff Dean. So the two of them paired together to say, what if we industrialized neural networks? What if we made them tens of thousands of times bigger than anyone had ever done before? Could that actually be the breakthrough that everyone's been waiting for? So we were the first ones who really made what got called deep learning. TPUs ultimately came from Google Brain. The transformer, which is sort of underpins everything, it's literally the T in ChatGPT, that came from Google Brain. So, you know, our job is to make the seed crystals that ultimately go on to change the world, and I think Google Brain counts as one of them. But there must have been a Speaker 1 (8:34) long period of time there where that was kind of quaint and promising, and then a period of time just recently where it's like... Holy crap, that was a lot more than quaint and promising. Speaker 4 (8:43) Of course, but I think the reality of any innovation is it takes a super long time. Every single innovation is like an overnight success that was 15 to 20 years in the making. And just because the general public only wakes up to it in year 18 of that slog, it feels like it happened overnight. Overnight success Speaker 5 (9:04) after 11 years of hard work. For sure. Speaker 2 (9:08) So, Astro, you've watched hundreds of moonshots, evaluated hundreds. What are a couple of examples of moonshots that you would like to have seen that didn't quite make it, didn't cut the mustard or whatever? You would have loved to have had them come to fruition. I mean, I have a Speaker 4 (9:25) very long list. I'll give you two examples. But we've been working on clean water over and over again. If you can make clean water, if you could pull it from the atmosphere, if you could desal for a tenth the price, you have to be able to get to like a penny a liter all in cost for it to really change the world. But we have