Anduril launches global AI drone racing league — open to anyone, $500K prize pool, recruiting engineers

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And without further ado, should we bring

Who we got? We got Jeff.

Jeff Miller. It's Miller time. We got Jeff Miller filling in from Ander. Second time. You're the first repeat live in person guest in the Ultra Dome.

Friend of the band.

Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the Ultra Dome.

Second time.

How do we get one of these? People are always asking us for jackets.

I'll trade you a jacket for a tiny gold plaque here somewhere in the

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is a record. This is a record. Uh yeah. Fantastic jacket. This is going to be flying off the shelf. Um is G get us up to speed on the Ander merch store. I mean you were doing some like you did like a an auction on eBay. Take us through.

Yeah, absolutely. So actually Jen Yeah.

Buchcci and I were cooking on this

former TV TBN

TBPN legend here.

So the way we're thinking about the gear store and this is something by the way we talk often with our our pal Trey also is that we're thinking about ways that for our friends we can bring them into Andrew. So beyond just following us on on X or watching our videos on YouTube that they can participate the brand in a way that they would want to. So we're going to be leaning into it hard this year with NASCAR as a platform with Ohio State with every campaign that we do. Uh we're going to have some staples like the flight jacket that will become much more easily acceptable uh accessible I should say. And then we're going to find some items that we'll just call high heat items that we're we're already putting on. And the closest thing I can say is you think about what we did with the chromatic with our friends at Mod Retro and and pulling that into an Android edition, what we're going to do with the M64. Think along that vein. So when those come be ready cuz they're not going to last long.

Okay. Uh yeah, take us through the racing update. Uh NASCAR's coming up, but you're also going to be racing drones now. Break it down for us.

Absolutely. Hey, why not?

Yeah.

So of course we've got NASCAR. We're just about 150 days out. I expect to see both of you guys on the base. race on the base

on June 21st. It's going to be a lot of fun.

Are we going to be able to be on the carrier? What's going is it will there be a carrier there? They're needed.

I can't speak for the works.

They don't answer me.

There may be one or multiple carriers on board and we'll see what we can do. But the the big thing I'd say is like as we think about our partnership strategy broadly, we have, as we talked about last time, something that is broaden pop that crosses over with our core audiences in defense and military like the Anderl 250 with NASCAR. We have something that's tied very clearly to where we have a manufacturing footprint with Ohio State. We're well on our way to building out Arsenal one as Grim spoke about last week, hiring those those 5,000 jobs that we committed to. The important thing I think for us is making sure that we still stay true to who we are across all these things. So I think about it as a spectrum and if that's about general population or how we work our ways into communities, at the core we are an engineering company. Yeah. that autonomy, if you think about it, has been at the core to this date of everything that we built. And so we want to make sure we have something that is not just a marketing play, something that feels much more about recruiting and standing for those values around autonomy. And so, uh, what is really just bringing you into the world of how we this came to be. Once we got the commitment from Palmer and the other execs that we were going to do the 250 in Ohio State, Palmer said, "Jeff, I'll let you do those things, but what you're going to do is build me a global AI drone racing." And I'm like, "Please tell me more, Bomber." I'm like, "Said like drone racing league." He's like, "No, no, no. All the drones have to be the same. The only differentiator is the software, is the code, the ability to build autonomy." And so that's what we've been working on since.

Yeah. So, the idea the idea here is people know they're going to be racing drones. We have goalposts here. I can imagine like uh something like that. They know they're going to have to be flying a route

like a track, but they I'm assuming they don't know what the track would actually look like until race day. So, they have to actually build.

It's going to be amazing. Like, so the way we're doing this is we're working first and foremost with the Drone Champions League, which is the foremost operator of of AI drone racing in in the world. So, we've got them as our official race operator, and we're working off of the model that they've built and they've tested and forged like a really viable path. So it starts with virtual virtual qualifiers. Anyone can compete in these virtual qualifiers. It's a simulator. It's a simulator. Exactly. And that will lead to a physical qualifier. You're going to have gates that you have to go through. And the top teams that qualify both from the university level and across the globe because it's going to be an open competition. Those will qualify for the first official AIG in Columbus, Ohio. And there you're going to have time to prep, refine your code leading up to the actual race day. And that's where all all systems go.

Yeah. What do you think the the average team will look like? I'm I'm thinking back to like the DARPA Grand Challenge. I don't know if that was inspiring at all, but the uh you know the teams from there mostly academic teams if I remember uh what do you think the mix will be? Who have you already talked to teams? How's that?

Yeah, so we've done a lot of research on on the approach to this. The clear mandate from our friend Palmer was this is open to anyone

to anyone.

This is not just 18 to 22 year olds. There was a point we're talking about like how can children raise this, right? Yeah. Yeah. children, but also like the Tesla team, the Whimo team. They're going to be like, "Let's just win."

And so, what I give our team incredible uh credit for.

Also, the big primes, let them let them big primes think that they can race.

They have an opportunity here to do the funniest thing ever.

Chinese national thinks they can come in here to race and win this.

We got to get some money.

Let's go. And that'll prove something there in its own right is our capabilities in the West relative to China.

I mean, all Yeah. All the all the LLMs are on uh the DJI router. Okay. Okay. But I think the things that are most important is at the core, we are using this as a recruiting effort. Thinking about cracked engineers, especially at that university level, we've done incredible diligence on the legal side to make sure when we say things like 500k prize pool, that it's eligible for anyone to race that uh you could win a job at annual, all those things are done in a legally compliant and thoughtful way. And I think most importantly that we're setting a standard with our partner in hardware. Yeah. Your friend

Saurin from Euros that we are using incredible technology that's gonna have clear chain of custody here in the states.

Dude, we got to get Saurin to fly a drone in here. Have you you've never seen him fly a drone in person? Not live. So Saurin is Saurin Monroe Anderson from CEO of Near and founder. He was I believe like a champion drone FP drone competed in in the DCL as well. Yeah. And so he puts on this uh I I I went out with Ben. Ben actually filmed it uh in Elsa Gundo. And he's like, "Let me I I do a little like factory tour with him." He has a very small uh office at that point in time. The company had just got off the ground. He's like, "Let's walk to this park. I'll show you how these drones work." And I you know, I've seen like a DJI camera drone like take off and it hovers and maybe like does a little selfie zoom out or whatever. Um his drones, it's a completely different level. It's a completely different level. He takes off and it's the most aggressive. It's the F1 car of of uh of drone racing. And he puts on these glasses, the FPV goggles, and they're like CRT TVs. They're like high refresh rate, pretty low res actually. Um but he's like flying around this tree like as fast as I can possibly. He doesn't crash anything. Flies back right in your face all around you. It's crazy.

It's so true. And obviously at Andrew, we know a thing or two about making drones. And we have great respect for for Saurin and the Nero's team. And what's a funny story? This the first time I was here in person at the drum. You know who your guest was directly before me?

Yeah, it was. That's right.

And you guys asked him. I was laughing because you said, "Hey, have you guys ever thought about starting a drum race?" Oh, we did.

We had We had not talked to him yet. We already were planning to. So, I just got serendipity. All started right here in the Ultra.

I love it. I love it. Yeah. So, uh, talk to me more about what it takes to actually deliver software on these drones, how standardized that is. I like I imagine you're not pulling in a Frontier LLM and having it reason over this stuff like like

hold on boss I'm going to wait at this gate 10 minutes of reasoning do a deep research report. we fully understand the the the scope of the track like what like what you know give me anything on the technology side like what are the parameters what are the languages that people will use do you know anything about

the beauty is we're trying to keep the rules extremely simple yes so the core focus is that everyone is going to have the same exact hardware we're working with right now and we'll be announcing this in in a future date the beauty too is like everyone's going to have their own canopy we're bringing a little the spirit of NASCAR as we think about sponsors and how you can your own branding.

We should sponsor a teamm this is happening. We're going to have TVPM their team. It just makes natural sense.

If you want to if you want to race in this,

hit us up.

You guys are ready. So, we'll talk to you guys about how you bring your team together. But from a tech side,

it really is the beauty is that once you have the hardware, everyone is going to be able to be on an even footing to bring together whatever they want to do and however they want to do it. And where I think the real advantage will come when people spend time at the physical qualifier.

Sure.

Show up there, break the thing a 100 times. We talk about this at Andrew all the time.

Fail, fail, fail, fail, win. That's the way we think about it. And I think that model, that approach, that that ethos applies here, too.

So, how do you keep a level playing field around hardware when drones are breaking and they are smashing? Is it like, oh, you get an aotment of five and then you're out?

We'll have exactly clear chain of custody. All credit to DCL and and Nero because they're controlling the the hardware component, but we've planned out and because of their experience, we know how many are going to break along the way. But there's not going to be any opportunity for anyone to be making mods beyond what we give them officially. Okay, that's very cool.

Yeah. Are there other like will people do you think people have the ability like overclock motors? Because a lot of racing of course in NASCAR F1 it's like tire management, fuel stops in certain races. We just saw this with the Rolex 24. Like at what level does it stay from just perception doing simultaneous location and mapping path finding to actually understanding like I can push the drone hard but then I'm running out of battery 24hour the endurance drone race.

Yeah. Yeah. like how many times do you

I think what you'll see is the battery is pretty lightweight but for the the distance of the race itself you're going to have enough battery load but it really will become to like finding all these little installs and

and there'll be risk if you corner a little bit closer

how you're doing it if you how you push it understanding the hardware better than the next and what risk exactly interesting interesting

but for us like what I'd say here is really special is beyond the fact that we're starting at Columbus

we're already working with Palmer in two really interesting ways like we have plans to roll out the second GP Okay,

in Asia that will be announced soon. The third GP in the Middle East and the fourth one beyond in the globe. And right now we're starting with quadcopters.

Okay,

the important element of the AIGP is the autonomy. It's not the form factor.

So just know that's something that could come to life underwater in different domains over time. Wonder would be cool. Feels Yeah. harder to film and stuff, but could be really cool. Yeah.

Well, let me just say that's the first of many domains. Palmer.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. I want to say tunneling ones.

Jordy said it, I didn't. Yeah, that that certainly be great. Um, what do you think teams will look like? Are they unlimited amount of people? I can show up with a thousand.

So, you can show up as an individual. We think the teams that are going to be really successful are going to show up between four and eight people. It's capped at at eight people.

Two beats a team.

Exactly. Yeah. And so, the the goal would be that you're we're talking to the all the universities that are going to express interest. We have target universities annual that really feed our pipeline of emerging talent and those teams we're hoping to get really excited about this. We think the prize pool is going to be a real incentive, but also that opportunity to win a job at Ander.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's good. It's good like resume builder, content, whatever, marketing. There's so many different ways.

It's interesting winning a job at Anderol when I think anybody that can get into the top five.

Yeah.

Probably every person on the team is qualified or at least some percentage of them. So, the pipeline, the talent pipeline is going to be very

gonna be incredible. And uh also why our lawyer now has a lot more gray hair than he did a little bit. But the important

doing any of these like giveaway contest thing at scale there's so much like legal headache with it. It's not as simple as

Yeah. Exactly. But luckily for us I think whether it's thinking about legal constraints for this uh what our people at and across divisions do is they see opportunity and they see how they can create solutions. But the the thing that gets me excited is like beyond whoever wins and and earns the job is that every university team member that shows up to the qualifier which is gonna happen near our HQ in September will get a screen directly by Android Recruiting. So if you're somebody that is interested in this, if you're somebody who's looking for an entry- level job or internship at Android, this is a great way to feed into our pipeline.

Yeah. Can you tell me more about the new uh Long Beach office? What's going on there?

Oh man. Well, somebody who lives in Venice, California, and works in Costa Mesa, can I just say I'm extremely happy that we have a Long Beach office coming,

it's incredible. I mean, the story writes itself from from Palmer's Origin to to where we are now.

Oh, yeah. That's where the first uh like what was it? The Airstream or something

100%. He's living out down by the river, right? So,

that's actually true.

It's incredible to to see it come full circle

down by the marina. It wasn't really a river.

Down by the river any rivers in LA. LA River is rough,

but it's uh it's really special the the origin story, the the fact that it's a reflection of of our growth or maturation, the engineering talent that we're going to be able to recruit, not just in Orange County, but now closer to LA and and ultimately whether you're working in SoCal in Ohio or beyond, we're still going to be screening for the same thing. And that starts with the mission, the connection to to what we're building.

Yeah. How big is the Orange County campus now? It's like

5,000 something. Oh, sorry, no, the new

the new one's 5,000. The the current one's a little smaller than that. Okay. But it's it's the type of thing that we're constantly building. You walk in

thousand square feet. That's pretty big.

No. People that that we're bringing in. Yeah.

But to be bringing over a million square feet to Long Beach, and to be doing it directly uh with the mayor of Long Beach, who's been incredible, and his team, it's just been really cool to see come to life.

That's great. That's great.

Uh what else is on the horizon on the marketing side for Andoral? Uh did you look at a a Super Bowl ad? Super Bowl's coming up. What else did you look at?

So, I'll tell you one thing. The core focus for us this year is absolutely showing the raw, the real, the product development, the failures, failure, failures that lead to the wins, the hard work. The scalability that we are seeing is reflecting that story. So, I think that's the important inflection point for us in 26. It's going to be less about the highly produced go to markets and it's going to be about we told you we were building these things. we are building them and we're going to show you how hard it is to scale but that we are up to the challenge and you know when we talk about this uh internally we talk about demonstrating to our customers that is not only the right choice we are the safe choice uh and we are the necessary choice for for what our country needs. So that's the story we need to tell. Um and how we do that is going to be about great worldclass product marketing that will likely look more transparent and raw than you've ever seen before. And then as we're thinking about working our way to to public markets, it's about building the annual brand. And that can be through a drone race for recruits. It can be about a gear store or big major sports marketing platforms. But it won't be a Super Bowl commercial this year. In fact, this past weekend, we weren't at the NFL playoffs. I was at a UFC fight in Vegas 324. I'll tell you that that to me is much more of of America and the audience that that I think has high crossover to uh and connections with with audiences that we see in in NASCAR. And whether we do a partnership with them or not, I think the point is that we're looking to do things differently than traditional brands, looking for partners that share our values and share our mission.

Yeah, that makes sense. Do you think that the wait on that like the the story that you're telling around like delivery and scale and reliability and the safe option does that mean visually you'll think you'll shift from product focused you know this like look at this amazing cool thing that does this thing to more of like highlighting what's happening at Arsenal the manufacturing prowess the scale is that the type of story you're trying to focus on is that what is that how this will

those stories to me complime each other. What it means is we're going beyond a product go to markets where say hey we're announcing this to the world to thinking about the stages of development post launch we did a really great job of this as a team I believe with Omen and we told why a tail sitter is so hard to produce we tap back into the history of tail sitters across decades and what our engineers were able to accomplish to make Omen successful and all the rigorous testing that we did. We're going to start to do that more with all of our products. But that doesn't stop with testing. It's about fielding. It's about putting in our customers hands and certainly it's about your point around manufacturing at scale. Y so that starts with Arsenal one. Why do we build it? The progress that we're making, the products that are scaling over time there and showing that the promises that we've made were able to deliver on.

Very cool. Jordy, anything else?

No.

Well, I have one other really important announcement in the spirit of our friend intern Tyler. Oh, yeah.

Special day for you. It's your birthday. What?

I brought the first drink I had.

Oh, no way. Ice burn off ice. Incredible known as the nectar of life. So the nectar of life of life.

Properly iced on the stream the first time ever.

Incredible.

People were talking about a buzz,

dude. Great to see you. You're the man. Ice. Well, this thing is huge.

That is a huge ice.

Why don't you uh You're 21. You can indulge. Enjoy enjoy a sip of

of uh

And I will tell Let's get the Tyler Camel. And we'll we'll flip that around and I will tell everyone about graphite. Oops, I just pushed Gastel. I'm sorry. First day on the board. Okay,

John's got a new board.

I have a new board. Let's go with graphite.

Here we go.

Is it going to work? Yeah, there we go. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Uh,

we love graphite. Hunter Weiss, friend of the show, sent me this uh video. He did a Call of Duty edit over Uber Eatat's Meal Team Six, New York City's elite special forces delivery unit. I wanted to take a look at this. Uh the Meal Team Six.

How did he How did he make this? Did he just walk outside?

Pull this up. Yeah, pull up audio.

Look at this. He's a good editor. online thing.

Let's go.

We're going to get copyrighted strike for this, but it's worth it. It's worth it.

It is so crazy uh how much snow is happening. We haven't been following it all, but uh US digs itself out from monster winter storm. People shoveled snow Monday in Boston where over 17 ines of snow fell in the weekend storm that had nearly 200 million Americans under weather warnings. More than 710 household 710,000 households from Texas to Maine are still without power. That's very rough. Hopefully that resolves quickly. Um, did you ever live in the snow? Have you ever lived in anywhere where it gets cold?

Not.

Tyler's the expert.

Yeah.

How's Michigan doing? Have you checked?

Oh, yeah. Michigan's really I don't know if they've

Are people snowed in? I think I think I thought it was a little bit further south. I thought it was like Tennessee is getting hit really hard.

But um yeah, I hate the snow. It sucks. That's why I'm living here.

I hate the snow.

Well, um where else should we go? We have our special guest joining in just uh eight minutes. Eight minutes. Um there is a clip from Ben, friend of the show, Ben Hilac. He was he attended the OpenAI interview with Sam Alman and uh town hall uh chief OpenAI hater Nick of course clipped it and put it in a negative context. Uh he he says uh you know there's some quotes here but let's pull up the the the question that Ben asked on this OpenAI stream.

A lot of discourse on like Twitter and X recently about chat uh about GT5's writing in chatbt um and being a little unwieldy hard to read. Um, obviously GT5 is a much better agent model, really good tool use, intermediate reasoning, whatever. Um, so it feels like it feels like uh models are a little bit spiky or they've gotten even spikier where some spikes like coding got super high, some spikes like uh or it's very unspiky around writing. So I'm just kind of curious how how OpenAI thinks about that.

I I think we just screwed that up. Uh we will make future versions of GPT 5.x X uh hopefully much better at writing than 4.5 was. Um we did decide and I think for good reason to put most of our effort in 5.2 into making it super good at

intelligence, reasoning, coding, engineering, that kind of thing. Um and we have limited bandwidth here and sometimes we focus on one thing and neglect another. But I believe that the future is mostly going to be about very good general purpose models. Um, you know, even if you're trying to make a model that's really great at coding. It'd be nice if it writes well, too. Like if you're trying to have it be able to generate a full application for you, you'd like good writing in there. When it's interacting with you, you'd like it to have a sort of thoughtful, incisive personality and communicate clearly. Like good writing in the sense of clear thought, not like beautiful pros. Um, so my hope is that we just push Nick.

Nick's in the chat. Oh no, his ears are ringing.

Uh, dimensions and I think we will do that.

Okay, fair.

We just read Nick.

You built a brand.

You built a brand. Uh,

yeah. I I mean, playing catchup now. I guess that's true. I guess that's true. At least uh in in Ben's perspective.

Nick John in the truth zone.

Truth zone. True. Um, no, no. I mean, uh, I was looking on Ella Marina, the leaderboard for text, and GPT 5.2 is 16th, like well, well below. Gemini 3 Pro is number one. Grock 4.1 Thinking is number two, Gemini 3 Flash, Opus 4.5, Opus 4.5, Grock 4.1. Uh, GPT 5.1 high is in ninth, and then you have to go down to 5.2 to get 16th. Um, to you have to go down to 16 to get to 5.2. Um, so yeah. Uh it is interesting seeing the uh like the spiky intelligence things kind of turned into a stat bar of like you know uh where are you putting the uh the like the points uh the skill points or whatever. Uh and they put too many of the points into

I will say I don't want chatbt to fix their issues with writing. I don't want it to be I I now am at a point where I'm like thank you for making it very easy to clock when something is written by AI.

I think that's totally like stated versus revealed preference. If you have like an incredible model that writes something that you find like super compelling obviously.

No, I'm talking about because people are using chat GBT now to make scripts for videos. They're using it to make uh to make to do bots that are writing comments. And I know as soon as I can see something is just written by Chad GBT that I can just scroll past it and and uh basically ignore it.

Yeah, sure. But imagine like in the far future where those comments are actually like, "Wow, this is like very insightful and thoughtprovoking and I'm glad that I read this text." Like that's good.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think I think we can get there.

Also, so I um back in March, Sam tweeted that they they trained a new model that is good at creative writing that he released this whole story. Yeah. Um and I think they they've never really released that. Maybe it got vended in somehow to

distilled a little bit, but there were trade-offs clearly and and it does seem and I I'm not sure that they actually did end up releasing.

Yeah, I mean the the really interesting thing to apologize and steal man Nick's point here is uh is is that like should