XPrize’s Peter Diamandis Funds Films to Challenge Hollywood’s Dystopian Narrative
As a child growing up in the 1960s, Peter Diamandis’s world changed when he began watching Star Trek. The sci-fi show’s utopian vision inspired him to launch companies in health, space and education and to create ambitious competitions through his XPrize Foundation. Today, he believes pop culture has swung too far in the other direction. These days, however, media portrayals of technology’s potential are decidedly more bleak. “All the films we’ve seen from Hollywood over the last couple of decades, from Terminator to Ex Machina to Black Mirror, are all painting dystopian pictures of the future,” Diamandis told Observer. “If that’s people’s vision of the future, why would you want to live there?”
That concern led to the Future Vision XPrize, a new competition that will award up to $3.5 million to filmmakers who depict optimistic, technologically enabled futures. At least one winning entry will be developed into a feature film that Diamandis hopes can serve as a modern-day Star Trek for younger audiences. “My hope is to really create inspiration for today’s youth,” he said.
The prize is the latest initiative from the XPrize Foundation, which Diamandis launched in 1996 with a $10 million competition for commercial spaceflight. Since then, the organization has run more than 30 challenges and awarded $519 million in prize funding for breakthroughs in climate, health, education and food security. XPrize’s broad mandate mirrors Diamandis’s own eclectic résumé: he holds a medical degree from Harvard and has founded more than 25 companies, including longevity venture Foundation Life, biotech firm Vaxxinity and venture fund BOLD Capital.
Diamandis’s newest idea took shape after he pitched it to Rod Roddenberry, a friend and the son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who agreed to sponsor the competition. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood also signed on. “Every day at ARK, we look five years out,” said Wood in a post on X. “This competition asks creators to do the same—and show us the upside of technologically enabled disruptive innovation!”
Presented in partnership with Google and the 100 Zeros initiative from Range Media Partners, the competition also counts crypto mogul Jed McCaleb and Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz among its donors. The prize pool, currently just under $4 million, is expected to grow as more backers join, Diamandis said, adding that sufficient funding could support two feature films instead of one.
Entrants must submit a three-minute trailer. Submissions opened March 9 and close Aug. 15, with a winner to be announced in September. The top entry will receive $2.5 million in production funding plus $100,000 in cash, while four runner-ups will each receive $100,000. Filmmakers are encouraged to use A.I. in their work in any way they choose—except for writing or generating their scripts. “This is meant to have human spirit and purpose in it,” said Diamandis.
So far, the contest has attracted around 1,000 applicants, a number Diamandis expects could rise to 5,000 or even 10,000. All trailers will be posted on YouTube, where he hopes to “flood” the platform with “positive visions of the future” set in worlds ranging from space habitats to robot-filled societies to civilizations that have eliminated aging.
He argues that this kind of optimism is essential to steering public attitudes toward A.I. away from fear and backlash. “I don’t think there’s any question at this point that there’s a lot of fear that’s growing out there,” he said. “That fear is going to lead to social unrest at a significant level.”
Beyond uplifting techno-utopian stories, Diamandis is already thinking about future XPrizes, including competitions that use A.I. to enable communication across species and to measure, then optimize, human happiness. Asked to name his favorite XPrize in the foundation’s 32-year history, he said, “The next one.”