Business · Companies · 1 day ago
Bill Gross uses AI to generate more than 1 million business ideas
Bill Gross is using AI to find business ideas that could address problems described in information people publish and share.
Gross founded Idealab, a technology incubator, in 1996 and has spent decades starting and investing in companies.
He first gave Anthropic’s Claude about 7,000 articles he had read, along with material on developing business ideas.
Claude generated 32,000 ideas in that initial test, Gross said.
He later added material including expired patents, company filings, consumer complaints on social media and science publications, and says the system produced a database of more than 1 million ideas.
The larger collection could help identify more problems to solve, supporting Gross’s goal of starting companies at greater scale.
The account does not specify which ideas will become businesses or what will happen next.
Bill Gross says an AI system generated a database of 1.2 million business ideas.
He tested Anthropic’s Claude with about 7,000 articles he had recently read, and it produced 32,000 company ideas.
Gross later expanded the material given to the system to include expired patents, SEC filings, social media consumer complaints and science publications.
He sees AI as a way to help solve more problems at scale, rather than make his work finding business ideas obsolete.
Gross founded Idealab in 1996.
- Who
- Bill Gross, entrepreneur and investor, used Anthropic’s Claude.
- What
- He used AI to generate a database of 1.2 million business ideas.
- When
- Recently; the sources do not give an exact date for the test.
- Where
- Not stated.
- Why
- Gross wanted to see whether AI could generate business ideas from problems described in news and other material.
This story does not have two clearly opposing sides.
Bill Gross founded Idealab.
Gross gave Claude about 7,000 articles he had read, along with material about generating business ideas, and the system produced 32,000 company ideas.
Gross expanded the material given to the AI, and it generated a database of more than 1 million ideas.
- Initial dataset
- About 7,000 articles
- Initial output
- 32,000 company ideas
- Expanded database
- 1.2 million ideas
- AI system
- Anthropic’s Claude
- Idealab founded
- 1996
What people are saying
I’ve got a database of 1.2 million ideas that basically solve pretty much every world problem because it was trained by reading every world problem
It came back with 32,000 company ideas, and they were incredible ideas
They blew my mind at how good they are
My whole life, I’ve been looking at the world, seeing problems, and trying to start companies to solve them