Moonshot AI

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Moonshot AI | Fortune

Moonshot AI Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

AI and machine learning are revolutionizing health care—accelerating research, enhancing operational efficiency, and enabling the move toward personalized, value-driven care. As transformation accelerates, how are visionary business leaders pushing boundaries and achieving breakthrough results? Join us as we explore bold innovations—from under-the-radar moonshots to disruptive success stories reshaping the industry.  

Insight Exchange: Equity, Access, Innovation: Health Care's Triple Moonshot

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Asia isn’t just following the global AI innovation playbook, it’s writing it. From China to Singapore and from chipmakers to LLM’s, the region is producing unicorns at a pace that is capturing the world’s attention. How do you go beyond the headlines and spot the next unicorn like Zhiphu AI, Moonshot AI or Sakana AI?  We'll explore the venture trends and sectors that are driving Asia’s AI start-ups forward and hear from the experts who know how to identify and bet big on the region’s next potential decacorn.  

Spotting the Next $1Billion Opportunity

Tim Brown, Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Allbirds Interviewer: Molly Wood, Molly Wood Media

Impact Initiative 2023: The Path To A Truly Circular Company

After a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2016, all boards launched and quickly became a certified B corporation. Three years ago, they partnered with Adidas to make their first iteration of a low carbon shoe. And in June of this year has announced they've created the world's first net zero carbon shoe here to discuss their Moonshot shoe. Please welcome Albert's co founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Tim Brown. He'll be interviewed by Impact Initiative co chair Molly Wood. Hello again. Thanks so much for joining me, Tim. Thank you for having me. We are going, don't worry, there are photos of the shoe coming shortly in case you haven't seen it. But um I, I want to jump in by asking you about this focus for you as a company and why carbon and why make this attempt at a carbon negative sho Sure. Uh So was founded with the idea that for 50 years, uh we've been making things out of plastic and synthetic materials and there was an opportunity uh in natural materials. Uh We were anchored in the idea that sustainability was our purpose, but what the hell does that mean? Uh And so we started uh anchored in this material innovation and quickly realized that our North Star was carbon uh sustainability. Part of the problem is that word has been pushed and pulled so much to almost be meaningless at this point. Uh And we were able to anchor on the idea that carbon could be our North Star in the way that we created products. So in the same way that calories go on food, we started to label the products that we made with the kilograms of carbon that were emitted in their production. And that was really the beginning of our, of our carbon journey. And all of a sudden, our designers and creators were putting products out into the world and they had effectively uh like a tin of baked beans, uh a score on them. So that was the starting point just out of curiosity, carbon as opposed to what as a well, I mean, I think sustainability means 100 different things. It's about air quality, water quality, animal welfare, biodegradability. And before long, you're not getting out of bed in the morning. It's so confusing, often times with competing incentives and really what you're trying to do is make a pair of shoes. So uh carbon became the focus in the same way that calories isn't the totality of a healthy diet. It's a very, very important North Star unifying metric and that allows us to compare different food groups uh in different places around the world in a consistent way. So the same thing we believe is going to be the future of how we evaluate the products and services that we use and every day. Um And so the result of that and we'll talk about some of the journey, but the result of that at least now is the Moonshot shoe, um, which I think looks like a cozy sweater. Let's have a look. We have some pictures here. Here it is the, is this the, this is the world's first carbon negative shoe as I understand it. Yes. Yeah. Right. And cozy sweater. Do you see it? Do you see it? So, our designers and creators and makers all of a sudden uh their work is effectively getting scored when it goes out into the world. Uh We did a partnership with Adidas uh that landed on a shoe that we released a couple of years ago at 2.94 kg of carbon, about half a hamburger. And our team was like, ok, as we look across the carbon footprint of the product, uh where are the opportunities to go even lower? Um And we were able to, with a partnership with our growing network, New Zealand Merino. Uh we were able to start to measure the out the gate carbon impact of the fiber that we were using realized through regenerative practices. Those numbers were low and in some cases negative. And there was a possibility if you designed and engineered every aspect of the product uh to make uh to make a shoe without offsets. That was uh net 00 My gosh, all of a sudden, this is really, really interesting. Um And the most fervent adopters of this particular methodology uh wasn't the sustainability department, it was the designers and creators that all of a sudden realized this was the path forward. This is the way that we were going to uh to, to continue to be able to talk about objects of desire in the same breath that we talk about sustainability. And this again seems enabled by this focus on a very specific one metric. Like it seems like the magic of what you've done here is create one metric and work toward that metric. The focus is really important. Um Five big buckets within a carbon footprint, the materials, the manufacturing, the transport, the packaging and the end of life all of a sudden, OK. I need to really, really look at every decimal point here. Uh And this is a game of ventures and actually you can, you can make really meaningful impact if you connect the dots here. Uh And that's been our journey. Um And it started really with this connection uh with the growers. So our uh we source wool from the New Zealand Merino Network. It's uh it's about 700 farms in New Zealand, slightly biased but very, I think the most beautiful corner of the world Uh And for the better part of a generation, no one in New Zealand's uh been growing up wanting to be a farmer. In fact, politically, they've been held up as the enemy of the environment, but we're able to partner with this growing network. Tell them that we will pay more for this fiber. Uh And that if it's properly measured, uh that there is uh some incredible opportunities to provide uh low carbon or even negative carbon fiber. Uh And in 24 months, almost 700 of those farms have signed up. Uh And it's an incredible example. I think of this moving quite quickly when you connect the spirit uh of innovation and economic opportunity to the idea of uh of, of making products and doing it now. So it's been an incredibly important thing for us, the other thing you did and I, I do want to give you an opportunity to ask questions. So think of your questions, put your hand up and a runner will come to you. Um One of the things though that I think you did it, that's really interesting is, is effectively open source, this tool kit sort of issue, this challenge to the rest of the um footwear community. I mean, is it specifically about building shoes or are you trying to sort of inspire carbon negative goods? So we've had some success through our history, open sourcing the materials that we use uh with the idea that that could serve our purpose. Uh And the more when we bring an innovation to market, the more people that use it, the more impact uh that we can have. But also with scale the cost come down and we're able to negotiate terms with our suppliers to make that happen. And in the case of Moonshot, again, that open source spirit has been there, the more people that adopt uh an understanding of carbon and an appreciation of, of the ability uh to use this framework to uh make better products with lower impact, the better that will be for everyone, but also for us because we believe we're doing it uh as good, if not better than, than anyone else. Um And also this is the future of how I think we're going to buy and consume. So um that mentality is, is at the core of how we build the business. And so this was uh released as an open source tool kit. Uh It's incredible, the number of people that have, have reached out uh big and small to, to use it. I think I'm yet to meet someone in the fashion industry that doesn't want to work this out. Uh often times the barriers to entry uh and an understanding of how to do that in a complicated economic environment. Um necessitates that we work together and we share. So we're trying to show leadership in that area. Wait, so I want to put a slightly finer point on that. It sounds like it's both altruistic and selfish. Because if you can get people to adopt these methodologies, you, you get past the kind of adoption gap more quickly, you get better economies of scale faster. I I think you, you can't look at this altruistically. You have to look at uh the opportunity to drive your purpose. But also for opportunities for economic economic gain, do not get into a conversation with a farmer and mention the term regenerative agriculture because they will and this has happened to me, they'll boo at you and they won't want to talk uh talk to them about economic opportunity and talk to them about the, the uh the grandchildren boun bouncing on their knee who uh has is counting the days before they can get off the property and tell them actually, no, this is, this is shifting back in your favor. Uh These kids are gonna want to come back and they're gonna see agriculture not as, as a, a historical part of New Zealand and uh but actually part of the future and that's what's happening. And so it's incredibly exciting and the language and the way that we talk about this is as important as the science that underpins it. Are there questions in the audience yet? No. OK. Oh Alan has one. Thank you. Uh You talked about the five big buckets uh materials manufacturing transport. I forgot what the last two were but, but I got hung up on the third. How do you get the carbon out of the transportation system that you have to use to deliver these issues? Well, look, it's, it's, it's, it's all about looking at this, at scale for us uh in really, really simple terms, air sea shipping and then within the, you know, get this on a boat. Uh and then within the, the sea shipping space at scale biofuels are coming into, into that space and you're able to um aggregate this. And relatively speaking, it's a tiny part of the overall carbon footprint of a pair of shoes that you put on. Generally speaking, we find that about half the number is in the materials a third give or take or even more is in the manufacturing. So it's a relatively small part of the overall carbon uh carbon number that, that constitutes the the final score on the product so that I had a similar question. So the carbon negative determination is inclusive. It's a life cycle and with, it's within, it's within the uh no offsets, it's within the calculation of the product. Uh And it's largely in, in our case driven by the uh the carbon negative merino wool. So wool is a little bit like saying cars, there's a lot of variants. Uh We're now understanding that technology can applied to measure out the gate scores for each property and each property is very different depending on how it's farmed, the cover crops, the, the nuances of the topography in each particular case, once we start to understand that which we are beginning to do, uh you can then incentivize the farmers, uh you can get truly accurate numbers and all of a sudden, uh the playing field is, is a little fairer in terms of the impact of the product at the end of the day. Um So the wool is that negative that it actually it, it serves as an accidental. It's one part of it. Yeah, you've got to look at every part of it. You know, there's a series of other carbon negative materials within, within the product. And then you've got to look at the packaging, you've got to look at every aspect of how, you know, uh of how it's put together. But it is possible. And I think that's exciting. We uh we went to the Global Fashion Summit in Copenhagen to release this product. Uh the preeminent event in the fashion industry. Uh And it was, it was notable for three things. No CEO S were there. Um None of the supplying network, the people that actually make stuff. Uh And no one showed up with an actual object. We spent a lot of time talking about 2050 which is really important. Don't get me wrong. But what are we doing right now? Uh And is the leadership of the business uh there and involved? And are we connecting um that business strategy and that feeling that we have that this is important to the consumer. And I think uh otherwise the criticism would be, there's a lot of people at Copenhagen and possibly even at this event, they are in the business of risk mitigation and the sustainability department is there to, to not get anyone in trouble. And I don't think that's where we need to be. Um I think that we need to think about sustainability as innovation about creativity and we need to balance the, the future with what we can do immediately. And right now and then finally it to that storytelling piece is this why consumers are buying all birds. And August 1 analyst suggested consumers are maybe not as excited about carbon negative uh shoes and said there were slowing sales at all bids. Is that why they're buying or not buying? Do you think a surefire way to not have someone meet you for a beer on a Friday night? Is to say that you want to talk about uh sustainability? That's when your friend will, will run. We, I mean, I will have that beer. You and I, you and I just uh you know, uh people don't buy sustainable products, they buy great ones. I don't think that uh any product or service can lay claim or business can lay claim to being great in this moment in time unless they are thinking deeply about sustainability and the principles of how it applies to their business. Um But let's, let's not get uh put the cart before the horse. You need to make great products, great experiences and you got to look for opportunities where purpose and profit intersect and where great consumer experiences and great product experiences uh can leverage sustainable uh opportunities. That's where we'll move this thing forward. And uh and I'm, I'm incredibly excited. I, I think there's a little bit of a lag between what people feel and what they believe and what's happening. Uh I'm, I'm excited for where we are. Great Tim Brown Ceo of all. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Dr. Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots, X
In conversation with: Terri Burns, Fortune Brainstorm Tech 

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Fly Me To The Moon 

Dr. Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots, X
In conversation with: Terri Burns, Fortune Brainstorm Tech 


Joining us today is someone who has, has had to think big but also make sure these innovations. See the light of day, Dr Astro Teller, a scientist, an author and an entrepreneur with a pretty unique job title. Captain of Moonshot Dr Teller leads X Alphabet's Moonshot Factory where they dream up risky and audacious ideas that are grounded in science and technology, but do have the potential to push the boundaries of innovation and are not just pie in the sky. So without further ado, let's welcome him to the stage, Dr Teller and he will be interviewed by brainstorm tech co chair, Terry Burns. Thank you. Hey Astro, how's it going? Great. I'm very excited to get into everything X. Thanks for being here today. So again, chatting with some folks as we've been network in and chatting, I've been hearing so many people have had enthusiasm and have heard a lot about X over the years but not so much in recent years. So to start, I would love to hear a little bit more about you, your role, your amazing job title and also just in general, what's going on at X these days? Well, that was a lot. Let me start at the beginning to create a little context, right? So I'm the captain of moonshots at X. It's Alphabet's Moonshots factory. And our job basically is to invent and launch breakthrough technologies that hopefully can help tackle some of the biggest problems in the world and are designed to create at least the foundations for large enduring businesses for Alphabet. Awesome. And go ahead. Well, so let me give you a few examples of some of the things that have come from X just to give you a sort of a background, a backdrop. So sometimes we make things that turn out to be right to move back to Google instead. So Google Brain which actually has come up during this conference is sort of one of the early epicenters for the machine learning explosion that's happening right now that came from X Verily, the Life Science business that came from X Waymo, the self driving car company that came from X Wing, the drones for package delivery that came from X Intrinsic more recently, which is our Moonshot for industrial robotics that came from X. And very recently just this January, we put out a new other bet, a new part of alphabet called mineral, which is our Moonshot in the agriculture space. I'm curious to hear about you. You've just listed a number of amazing projects that have come from X. I want to talk about failure a little bit. What are some or an example of an X project that maybe you would categorize as a failure that you and your team have learned from. Well, one of the ones that comes to mind for me is loon. So we had this aspiration that if you could somehow magically get cell towers into the stratosphere floating around, they could go where they wanted to go. But then somehow stay, even with the high winds just where you wanted them to be and beam internet down to the ground you could create for people, particularly in outlying areas, not in large cities, connectivity that several billion people in the world don't have today. We were really excited about this. And amazingly, after nine years, we had it working these balloons, hundreds of them were flying around world were creating these ad hoc mesh networks in the sky. Beaming four G LTE and five G to people, particularly in Kenya and Peru or two of the early places. We were testing this. I remember the buzz about all of that and was so uplifting because of this goal of solving for connectivity. And it turned out the techno economics per bit were good but not great. They weren't as good as we wanted them to be. And we just didn't figure out a right way to solve with the telcos who are our partners who are going to be our connectivity to these people in various countries. And one of the things we learned from that is if we have to get everything working perfectly before the ecosystem will talk to us about whether they really want it or not, that's not worth it. So we're not going to do that again. That's a big takeaway that we had. Yeah, thanks for that. You all sort of know the drill. Now, I am going to turn it over to audience questions in just a minute. But before we do that, I would love to get here the latest, what are some of the big moon shots that you and your team are working on right now that you're really excited about? I'll give you two. But let me start with, we're fond of, of talking about Moonshot compost of recognizing that the people, the code, the patents, the learnings that come from anything that we do, even when it doesn't work out can supercharge the next attempt for us to solve the same or similar problem. So in the case of connectivity, there are still three plus billion people in the world who have little to no connectivity. We're still really passionate about solving that these balloons. I was just talking about up in the stratosphere were talking to each other using lasers. And so someone said his loon was winding down. Well, hold on a second. What if those things were brought down to the ground? Six years later, our project Tara is using wireless optical communications, these thin beams of invisible light, which can go up to 20 kilometers and get the benefits of fiber optic cabling without needing to trench cables. And we're rolling these out in Africa, in India and in a lot of other places around the world, we're really passionate about how well that's working. And amazingly, we're now moving more bits to real customers every single day with Tara than we did in the history of living. Wow, that's amazing. So you are literally able to take this failure if you will and leverage that technology to one of the most exciting projects that you're working on now. Exactly. Awesome. Let me give you another example. We're really passionate about the electric grid. The electric grid of the world needs a Moonshot. The electric grid of the world is the largest machine humanity has ever made. It's the most complex machine that humanity has ever made. It's the most expensive. So no one really knows what's going on with it. You would think that the people who move the electrons around, who make the electrons, the generators who transmit them, who distribute them at the edge would know where every wire was, where every inverter was, where every piece of equipment that it takes to keep the grid together, where it is, how it's functioning. And they don't, they just don't because it's too complex. So tapestry, our Moonshot for the electric grid is working to virtualize the grid to first help the grid just maintain what they have. If they don't know what's broken or what might soon be about to break, they can't fix it proactively. Then number two help them to be able to plan for the future as most people in the audience know right now the wait times on getting renewables onto the grid in the United States is like seven plus years and getting longer by the day, not shorter. And the reason is because the system operators don't know what it would do to the grid to plug a new solar field onto the grid. And so they spend weeks playing a few 100. What if games about the worst case scenarios to try to figure out if it was going to be safe or not? If you had a virtualization of the grid, then you could answer that question. Will it be safe or not in a few minutes instead of in a few weeks? So that's the kind of thing we're really excited about with tapestry and that's tapestry. Got it. Ok. I want to turn it over to the audience. Do we have any questions for Astro one up here? Hi, Catherine Ducker with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I think all of us in this room probably massively envy your job. And I would love to hear a little bit about what factors guide the type of initiatives that your team pursues. What sort of that checklist of. Yes, this initiative has the potential to do Xy and Z we're gonna take it on at the most basic level. What we say is we won't even start on a journey until it has a Moonshot story hypothesis. And in order for it to have that, it has to have three basic things. Number one, you have to be able to name a huge problem in the world you want to solve. If there's not a huge problem you want to solve, then it's an academic exercise. Number two. And so that should be pointed at either a market that currently exists or a market that could be made if there's a huge problem that's being solved. Number two, what's the radical solution you're proposing and help us understand why it's radical because if it's what everyone else is doing, at least when we start, that's not the thing we should be in the business of working on. We should be exploring blue oceans, not the places that people are already fishing. And so those radical proposed solutions should in principle be science fiction sounding, but they're products or services once we develop them, if we can. And then the third thing that we require is some kind of technology that would be breakthrough if we could do it. And that gives us a reason to believe in the early days, we can test this hypothesis. It's OK. If the hypothesis is wrong, it's not OK. If it's going to take us many years to find out if we're wrong back to this issue about loon and getting as good as we can, as fast as we can, as efficient as we can. And answering the question is this very unlikely sounding Moonshot story hypothesis of yours going to make it or not? Because 99% of the journeys we start out on don't make it. So we can't say making it is what counts as good. It's how efficiently we filter them. That's where we think of getting our alpha. Any other questions from the audience? I'm curious to hear you mentioned Google brain. Google brain spun out of X 11 years ago and now everyone's buzzing about deep learning ai generative ai there's a lot of investors in the room myself included. If you could predict, what is that X today? That's going to be the big buzz 11 years from now. What do you think that would be first caveat? I don't believe in predicting. I believe that our job at X is to be efficient explorers so we can discover what's next. So I'm going to make what sounds like a prediction but it is, it has come through the process of exploration. Not like you know what I think would be great. Yeah. Not, not a crystal ball. Yeah, exactly. You got it. One of the things that I believe is getting to the place where 11 years from now we might be sitting around and talking about this subject primarily is synthetic genomics. I believe the movement from biology as a science to biology, as an engineering discipline is almost there, all of the pieces are just coming together and we don't have everything ironed out yet. I mean, we, the world, not just we x but I am seeing enough interesting pieces and early green shoots and enough even different parts of things we're doing at X that's starting to feel like one of those things that's going to be a really big deal in the future. Absolutely. I think that that's really compelling investors take notes. I'm curious to hear more about, we talked a little bit about failure, the opposite side of things. What does success look like at XX? And when something is successful graduates, how do you define that? What does that look like in the long run for a Moonshot to be successful? There almost inevitably has to be some tech innovation. There has to be product innovation and there has to be market innovation. There's kind of no way to innovate in any one of those areas without having to innovate in the others, particularly if you innovate in the tech area. So by the time it leaves X for sure, we need to believe that the tech has been meaningfully de risked. We understand it better. That doesn't mean that there's no risk left, but we should have moved to a place where execution risk is more than 50% of the risk. But we also need to see some early demonstrations on the product and market side that make us believe that this isn't just a build it and they will come kind of situation but that this really has a viable chance to become an alphabet scale business that could be really great for the world. Our final question is around ethics. X is trying to think about massive problems that theoretically can impact the lives of everyone. How do you bring an ethical lens to those explorations and the development of that, of those technologies with an X that's worthy of an entire hour of conversation. So I have 60 seconds, but in 60 seconds, I would say, I do not believe that having ethicists on board and somehow just passing it over to the ethicist to pass judgment on things is the right way to solve this problem. I think you need to wire an appreciation for we're in this with the world, for the world not to see if we can get some money and run before they figure it out, helping everyone to really feel that is job one and then job two is you don't know what's going to happen, what the unintended consequences are. So X has become expert at getting out into the world early in safe sandbox ways. So we can start to be in dialogue with regulators and with the public, not just in Silicon Valley, but all over the world. Where we test the things that we're doing. So we can say, how are you experiencing this? Which parts of this in Kenya? In New Zealand, in South Africa? In Peru? How is this better than we may have hoped? How is this worse or different than what we were hoping it would solve your problems? And that learning turns into an iteration with those people. And I think that's how we avoid the kind of unintended consequences that happen when people just mix until they're done and then sort of like dump it on the world at the last minute. Absolutely. Astro. Thank you so much for. Thank you. Thanks everyone.

Moonshot AI

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