For decades, the entrepreneur and investor Bill Gross has been celebrated for shaping the way tech businesses get off the ground.  

Idealab, which he founded in 1996, is considered the industry’s longest-running tech incubator; the directory of companies it’s backed—including CitySearch, Coinbase, Picasa, and Twilio—doubles as a museum of ever-shifting trends in logo design. Over the years, he’s also founded businesses in fields ranging from internet advertising to clean energy. 

“My whole life, I’ve been looking at the world, seeing problems, and trying to start companies to solve them,” Gross says.  

And for him, finding problems in search of a solution has typically involved extensive reading, including most of the major finance and tech publications. Recently, while reading an article about copper shortages, Gross reflected on how much of what he reads contains some sort of implicit problem statement and wondered how artificial intelligence might fare at generating business ideas based on news reporting. 

In an initial test, Gross supplied Anthropic’s Claude with about 7,000 articles he had recently read, along with material he had put together about coming up with business ideas. “It came back with 32,000 company ideas, and they were incredible ideas,” he says. “They blew my mind at how good they are.” 

At first, Gross wondered whether that meant the technology would make his role of finding exciting new business ideas obsolete. But instead, he realized, it meant AI could help further his longstanding goals of solving more problems at scale. And when he expanded the dataset provided to the AI, including documents like expired patents, SEC filings, consumer complaints from social media, and plenty of material from science publications, the AI system was able to generate a database of more than 1 million ideas.

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