Anduril has invented a wild new drone flying contest where jobs are the prize 

Palmer Luckey’s eyes light up and he talks at a rate of one minute as he discusses his company’s new recruiting event: the AI Grand Prix.

This is a drone flying competition with a twist. Instead of humans controlling drones, drones should operate autonomously. The humans will be tested on their software writing skills, allowing the drones to outsmart the competition.

There are prizes ranging from a $500,000 pot to be shared among the highest scoring teams, to jobs at Anduril and a chance to bypass the company’s standard recruitment cycle.

“It was something I decided we had to do,” Anduril founder Luckey said in an interview with TechCrunch. Luckey and the team met to discuss recruiting strategy, he recalls.

Someone suggested sponsoring a drone racing tournament, which was somewhat in line with the company’s previous marketing tactics. For example, Anduril sponsors the NASCAR Cup Series race known as the Anduril 250.

Luckey generally liked the idea, but then said, “Guys, that would be really stupid for Anduril to sponsor. The whole point, our whole motivation and reason for being, is this pitch that autonomy has finally advanced to the point where you don’t have to have someone micromanaging every drone,” he recalled, adding, “What we should really be doing is sponsoring a race about how well programmers and engineers can make a drone fly on its own.”

After discovering that such an event did not exist, the company decided to organize it itself. Interestingly, Luckey pointed out that the teams in the AI ​​Grand Prix will not fly Anduril’s drones, but drones built by another defense technology startup: Neros technologies. According to Luckey, Anduril’s drones are physically too large to operate on the closed course in Ohio, where the finals will take place.

“We talked about teams using Anduril drones, but Anduril doesn’t make drones that are as fast and very small as you would want for a Drone Racing League. They’re usually bigger things,” he said.

Anduril is also partnering with one of the established racing leagues, the Drone Champions League to organize the event, and with JobsOhio. The final race will take place in Ohio (where Anduril’s main production facility is located).

While Luckey is clearly excited about how fun the event will be, he won’t be a racer himself. “I will absolutely be there,” he says, but “it’s about who can build the best software to control these drones.”

He smiled and said, “I’m actually not a very good software programmer. I’m more of a hardware guy. I’m an electromechanical and optical guy, and I know just enough about coding to glue things together in a way that works for my prototypes.”

(Luckey calls Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf “our de facto lead software brains” at the company.)

The founder hopes to have at least 50 teams and already has interest from several universities, he said. If this competition is a success, the plan is to expand it to races with other types of autonomous vehicles.

“We’re starting with these quadcopter racing drones, which is what people expect from drone racing. However, we want to apply AI racing to other platforms in the future,” he said.

Underwater AI racing, ground AI racing, and possibly even spacecraft AI racing were some of the ideas Luckey shared.

The competition is open to all international teams, with the exception of teams from Russia.

“The difference with Russia is that they are actively involved in the invasion of Europe,” he said.

The concern is that the people qualified to participate in such a race may also work for their country’s military. “I would love to have everyone there, but we are not the Olympics,” he added.

Luckey said the event followed the lead of the World Cup, which also excluded Russia.

Interestingly, teams from China (home to a lot of autonomous tech) are welcome, despite this being the country that US autonomous weapons hawks often cite as their biggest fear.

Should a Chinese team win, the prize of a job at Anduril, which makes weapons used by the U.S. military, would not be a given. “If you work for the Chinese military, you shouldn’t get a job at Anduril,” Luckey said. Certain laws apply, he pointed out. In fact, some interviews and qualification processes will still take place for all applicants.

The competition takes place over three qualifying rounds starting in April, with the final Grand Prix race scheduled for November.