Billionaire Peter Diamandis offers $3.5 million to filmmakers to portray AI as a hero—not a villain

Billionaire founder of XPRIZE Peter Diamandis is tired of the doomsday scenarios painted by movies like Terminator or Ex Machina.

The engineer and Harvard-trained doctor-turned-entrepreneur is trying to change the narrative with a new $3.5 million Future Vision XPRIZE. Backed by Google and talent agency Range Media Partners’ 100 ZEROS initiative, the fund will promote “optimistic sci-fi,” offering a novel look at an often dystopian-geared subgenre of science fiction movies. 

Aspiring filmmakers can submit three-minute trailers or short films that portray “positive visions of the future,” for the chance to be one of five finalists to receive $100,000 in cash. The winner will receive both the cash prize as well as $2.5 million to make their idea into a full-length film. This is combined with the $500,000 total given to the finalists plus $500,000 more in additional prizes not yet revealed to make up the $3.5 million prize.

The finalists will present their films at Diamandis’ Moonshot Gathering, a new conference he is launching in September aimed at younger entrepreneurs. Diamandis, who founded the XPRIZE Foundation to lead design and operations of large-scale incentive competitions, said he expects the final prize to increase as additional backers come on board.

The new XPRIZE comes as anxiety over the future of AI is mounting. Layoffs tied to AI tools increased last month after Block laid off 4,000 employees, with CEO Jack Dorsey citing the capabilities of “intelligence tools.” High-profile business leaders such as Jamie Dimon and Microsoft’s AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman have also warned against AI’s potential to replace white collar workers and put people out of work. Meanwhile, one of the biggest AI players, Anthropic, said in a report last week that not just entry-level employees, but also older, more educated workers could be at risk for displacement.

Against that backdrop, Diamandis said the new XPRIZE is more needed than ever. As technology and people’s fear about it both grow, there needs to be a more positive example of what the future could look like, he argued.

“I challenge you to talk about one positive movie about technology—and if that’s the only image you have of the future, why would you want to live there?” Diamandis told Fortune.

Diamandis pointed to the show Star Trek as the kind of sci-fi he wants to foster—a show that portrayed collaboration between humans and technology rather than conflict. When he was creating the prize, he reached out to Rod Roddenberry, founder of The Roddenberry Foundation, whose father Gene Roddenberry created the show, and got him to support the idea. Cathie Wood, the CEO of asset management firm ARK Invest, has also signed on as a sponsor.

For more than 30 years, Diamandis and the XPRIZE Foundation have pushed for research and development in everything from space travel to increasing humans’ health span in what has now culminated in 30 prizes and more than $600 million in prize purses.

This newest XPRIZE was a natural extension of the foundation’s work, Diamandis said, and yet, while the prize is promoting technology, the films submitted for the prize must be human, not AI-driven.

“We’re not looking for an AI to write a script and an AI to make a film without a human in the loop,” he said. “This needs to be driven by someone who has got an impassioned vision of what a future worth living into can look like.” 

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