X, The Moonshot Factory

"Engineering is always associated with math. But the creativity behind engineering is very hard to measure." The Moonshot Podcast’s latest behind-the-scenes video is now live! Astro Teller sat down with Wing’s former Chief Engineer, André Prager, to discuss creativity, problem solving, and prototyping. André shares his obsession with simplicity, why engineering often feels more like creating art, and how the Wing team solved some of their toughest engineering challenges: https://lnkd.in/gtdrkJV3.

Excited to share our collaboration with Renault Group at their groundbreaking ReFactory in Valladolid. Vehicle reconditioning is uniquely complex - hundreds of vehicles, each with different states and timelines. Traditional systems can't handle this. But working with Renault's visionary team, we've proven that Chorus can bring clarity to chaos. What excites me most: this scales. What we're achieving at one facility can rapidly deploy across entire automotive networks worldwide. Grateful to the Renault team for their partnership in showing what's possible when manufacturing expertise meets advanced orchestration.

This World Nature Conservation Day, we’re spotlighting Heritable Agriculture, X’s Moonshot to Program Plants. While incubating at X, the team created a machine learning platform that can uncover critical new details about how plants grow and how to optimize their growth. Today, Heritable Agriculture is an independent company working to help farmers and agriculture companies produce healthier, more productive, and more resilient crops. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gqGgGXps

“We get to build the future that we want. We make choices about what that future looks like. And we can choose things that are beautiful, fascinating, and artistically informed, or we can choose to build things that are scary, alienating, predictable, and boring.” In the latest episode of The Moonshot Podcast’s Deep Dive video series, X’s Captain of Moonshots Astro Teller sat down with Robot Choreographer Dr. Catie Cuan for a conversation about how dance can be used to build beautiful and useful robots that people want to be around: https://lnkd.in/dk_aFJrT

Tidal founder Evan Rapoport believes that taking moonshots can be “a spiritual experience.” Tune into Episode Four of The Moonshot Podcast to hear why and how he and the Tidal team first approached the challenge of protecting the oceans and feeding the world’s growing population: https://lnkd.in/eG5MuECT

🎉 Congratulations to two X graduates—Waymo and SandboxAQ—for being named to TIME’s 2025 Most Influential Companies list! “Self-driving cars have long featured in sci-fi renderings of the future,” writes TIME Correspondent Andrew Chow of Waymo. “But many people don’t realize that a handful of cities already exist in that future—and that the transition, all things considered, has been relatively painless.” SandboxHQ, which builds software for drug discovery and materials science, has “proven its value” by helping researchers explore and iterate faster, writes TIME Reporter Harry Booth. Check out the full list here: https://lnkd.in/emKkn_X9

“For years, the insurance industry has grappled with a lack of accurate, forward-looking wildfire risk data. Until now, no technology could effectively parse and analyze this scale of information.” X’s Project Bellwether recently announced they’re working with the global insurer Hiscox to increase the availability of wildfire insurance to homeowners across California. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gcgSTjjV

The Moonshot Podcast is back with video interviews by popular demand—and we’re going behind the scenes! In the first installment of our Deep Dive video interview series, X’s Captain of Moonshots Astro Teller sits down with Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of the Moonshot Factory, for a conversation about the history of Waymo and Google X, the ethics of innovation, the future of AI, and more: https://lnkd.in/gWrRRtZ9

Tapestry’s Page Crahan joined david roberts on a recent episode of the Volts podcast to discuss how AI can address humanity’s energy challenges, why her team is building a “Google Maps for electrons,” and more. Scroll through some of the highlights below, and listen to the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/dqBJHfU7

Homeowners in wildfire-prone areas often lose out on insurance simply because there isn’t good enough data to accurately assess their risk. Project Bellwether’s groundbreaking new partnership with the global specialist insurer Hiscox aims to help change that. Today Hiscox announced that they’ll be using Bellwether’s AI-powered wildfire prediction model to offer fairer pricing and wider coverage to more homeowners across California. After just a few weeks, Bellwether has already helped them provide additional insurance options for California homeowners. This is because Bellwether's insights reveal areas of low risk inside broader areas previously deemed too risky to insure. Unlike current models, Bellwether machine learning models process 20 years of data across 600 geodata layers, and analyze billions of Earth data points in real time, making it possible to deliver insurers absolute risk scores and predict wildfire risk in individual 100-by-100-meter areas up to five years in the future with unprecedented accuracy. Read more about Bellwether’s partnership with Hiscox, and how these tools can be applied to a whole host of other hard problems related to the Earth and the built environment: https://lnkd.in/gcgSTjjV