Bill Gross bets AI can help mass-produce 1 million new startups and 100 million new jobs

The goal: to help fledgling entrepreneurs create a million new businesses and 100 million new jobs by giving everyone free tools to test their ideas and build them into businesses.

“This is the biggest thing I could do to have the most positive impact on the world,” Gross told me last week. “With Idealab, I could do 10 companies at once; now, I could do 10,000 at once. I feel like this is the ultimate use of AI. What could be better than using it to solve actual world problems?”

If Idealab can get involved in some of the ventures—great, but his main motivation is to spur more global entrepreneurship with ideas and an ecosystem to get things done.

Building startup ecosystems with artificial intelligence

Matthew Prince of Cloudflare has already committed $100,000 in credits to each startup using the platform. As Prince explained to me on Friday, “helping match talented entrepreneurs with vetted business ideas matched to their skill sets seems like a killer way to unlock more entrepreneurship and solve some incredibly important problems.”

Gross is planning to approach other companies to seek similar support. He also said versions will connect users to potential funders and partners, among other things. And he anticipates that users will have their own ideas. JUST Capital’s Martin Whittaker, for one, has already asked him for a filter to identify disadvantaged cities since impact investors often want to focus on supporting startups in those areas.

I asked my colleague, AI editor Jeremy Kahn, what he thought of the idea. He responded that “Bill’s idea is a really fascinating use case for AI,” adding that such a system could help supercharge entrepreneurship. Whether new business formation will offset job losses remains to be seen, Kahn noted, and he echoed Gross’s contention that “having an idea is just a tiny part of what building a business is all about.” The most important tools may be those that connect people to collaborators and help with execution.

Leveraging intellectual property and patents

With this platform, Gross could unleash a lot of entrepreneurial energy and help shift the narrative that AI is something to fear. He’s acutely aware of AI’s destructive power, having removed about 100,000 ideas that could be deployed to do harm. People can type in their LinkedIn profiles or skills into Idealab.ai to serve up ideas that align with their talents and passion. And Gross is creating ways to connect with capital and quantify likely startup costs. If you want an idea that costs $50,000 to start, the platform shows you around 32,000 options.

One of the most fascinating features is the patent search, which can be filtered by academic institutions or companies. Type in Caltech and 9,978 patents come up. Type in 3M and there are about 21,000 patents. Imagine how all that IP can now be deployed. For Gross, this is just the start. “Six months ago, this wouldn’t have worked,” he told me. “The quality of Fable and GPT-6 was the essential ingredient to make this good enough to invent new ideas. Before that, gibberish would come out. Now, by giving it my 31 methods, it comes up with new stuff that’s so good, it’s incredible.”

It certainly came up with a lot of ideas for me, from an “expert-owned interpretive news desk” and “evidence room for business decisions” to “publisher-backed vertical intelligence brands,” an independent studio and a newsletter called “The Daily Deep Read.” I guess that means I’m where I should be.