Palmer Luckey plans to put $10 million toward talking with animals rather than building AI models. Peter Diamandis, the founder of XPRIZE, revealed the plan on stage. Luckey founded the virtual-reality company Oculus VR and the defense technology company Anduril Industries.
The two spoke at Moonshots Live 2026. The conversation was recorded on September 25, 2026 and released on September 28 as an episode of Moonshots with Peter Diamandis. XPRIZE runs large cash competitions for technical goals. Diamandis said the organization would announce "another $10 million prize" funded by Luckey "in a month's time." He said it would stay secret until then, but that he wanted to "tease it now." That puts the formal announcement roughly a month after the recording. No firm launch date was given.
What the prize is meant to reward
Luckey kept most of the details back, saying "there's some good twists." He did describe the goal. The prize will be about "understanding how animals think" and communicating with them "10 times better than the current state of the art for the current smartest species."
He said the target is "not just trained animals, but wild animals in their own language." The aim, in other words, goes beyond animals that people have trained: it reaches wild animals communicating in their own way.
Neither Luckey nor Diamandis said how "10 times better" would be measured, which species count as the "smartest", or what today's baseline is. Those rules have not been disclosed.
Why not fund AI instead
Luckey said the choice was deliberate. "I'm not interested in joining the race to push AI forward with my money," he said. In his view, the model-building side of artificial intelligence "is pretty well covered by plenty of people." The neglected area, he argued, is biological intelligence, "particularly beyond people."
He still connected the prize to AI. Large language models, the systems behind chatbots like ChatGPT, learn from huge amounts of human writing. Luckey described them as "based on humanity's way of thinking and communicating distilled." Other species, he suggested, might think in ways that human text does not capture.
"I wouldn't be surprised if it has applications for AI," Luckey said, "particularly AI where you need to be more efficient, more power efficient, more time efficient." He presented this as a hunch, not a result. Studying how other animals think could give AI builders a different point of view, in the way that two heads are better than one.
The prize's full terms, including the twists Luckey hinted at, are expected when XPRIZE makes the announcement Diamandis promised.