Idealab’s Bill Gross thinks AI could help launch 1 million new businesses, making up for any job losses it causes

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition:

• Idealab’s Bill Gross gives away 1.2 million AI-generated business ideas.
• Ex-OpenAI employee accused of planting bugs denied bail.
• OpenAI discloses more rogue AI incidents involving financial, medical, and government data.
• AI safety experts unhappy with Anthropic’s proposed AI bill.
• Anthropic pledges 5% of its shares to new public benefit fund.
• Maybe neural networks aren’t as hard to understand as we thought.
• OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra aces new theoretical physics benchmark.

There’s been a lot of concern, understandably, about AI eliminating jobs. So far, the great job apocalypse hasn’t shown up. But there are hints out there that jobs are getting harder to find and that AI is part of the reason.

Bloomberg reported this week that banks in the U.K. are slashing back-office jobs, thanks in part to AI Anthropic unveiled data showing that as it has deployed AI throughout its fast-growing organization, who it hires has shifted. Far fewer junior employees are being hired in technical roles than previously. Since early 2025, hiring of junior technical employees has fallen from 27% of all new hires to 9%, the company said. Anthropic is also hiring a lot fewer administrative staff than a company growing at its pace typically would. If other companies follow this pattern as they adopt more AI, there are likely to be significantly fewer jobs in the economy.

While this may be worrying, a little-discussed feature of the AI revolution is how it could supercharge entrepreneurship—and how a surge in new businesses could partly offset some of AI’s negative impacts on employment. Yesterday, Bill Gross, the founder and CEO of Idealab and ProRata, unveiled a new project that highlights this potential.

Idealab was one of the first startup incubators when it was launched back in 1996. Since then, it has helped spawn some 175 companies. Over the years, Gross has developed 31 techniques—he calls them “methodologies”—for generating business ideas. Really, these are creative prompts for thinking about idea generation. Gross breaks these down into three big categories: opportunities, which he says are things such as solving a business pain point, removing friction, removing waste, removing danger, and improving design, among others; enablers, such as new technologies, scientific advances, and new materials, processes, or changing cost curves that make solutions more feasible than before; and shifts, such as regulatory changes, as well as behavioral, economic, cultural, or geopolitical movements that make the timing for a particular business seem right.

Gross fed these 31 methodologies to an AI model along with some 17 million source documents that included news stories, research reports, expired patents, public company filings, and threads from online community discussion boards. In this way, Idealab’s AI generated more than 1.2 million business ideas. And Gross has decided to give those ideas away for free.

“I’ve always wanted to have a positive impact with Idealab by starting many companies, but I can’t start 1.2 million,” Gross told me in an interview over the weekend. “But what about if I can empower entrepreneurship around the world way more than I’ve been able to do in Pasadena [where Idealab is based]? So it just got me very excited that this could be a gift, taking my methodology and now AI’s potential, to give it to others.”

Unlocking trapped IP

Gross said he sees business as fundamentally a way to help solve problems, and he thinks AI can energize that process. “I feel like so many people are talking about the hazards and dangers of AI,” he told me. The positive use case for AI, he said, is often just reduced to “curing cancer.” That would be an unalloyed good. But he thinks it actually sells AI’s potential benefits short. “There’s so many other problems that AI can actually address,” he said.

Anyone can go to idealab.ai and explore the 1.2 million ideas, querying them by industry, skills, individual interests and geography. People can upload their resume or Linkedin profile and get a personalized set of potential business ideas that might suit them. People who already have an idea, can upload a business plan and ask the AI engine to help refine it, or generate 100 neighboring ideas to help improve it.

Existing organizations, such as companies or universities, can also search for business ideas across their own existing patent portfolio. Gross said that currently, a lot of IP in these large enterprises is essentially trapped, sitting there unused in any productive way. He thinks idealab.ai could free that IP—allowing the formation of new business units or spin-out companies to exploit this hidden value. He said he tried it on Caltech’s patent base, which is 9,978 patents, and found that those could be used to generate some 3,450 new businesses. He said that industrial conglomerate 3M had some 21,000 patents that could be used to generate 1,549 new business ideas. “I’m really hoping that this will not only help entrepreneurs do things, but help big companies do things too,” Gross said.

Gross’s vision: 1 million new companies and 100 million new jobs

The AI model provides a rollout plan for the new business. If an entrepreneur needs money to help get the business off the ground, Gross said they can reach out to Idealab and the incubator will consider investing. And if an entrepreneur needs help to implement a business plan, Gross is planning to offer assistance there too. He has created what he calls a “Periodic Table of Business Functions” that charts some 118 different jobs—from customer discovery to sales to operations and legal—that are required to set up and run a business. Idealab has created an agentic AI environment that will help entrepreneurs automate those tasks. Unlike the ideas, which Idealab is giving away for free, Gross is charging for these Periodic Table services, which he said will launch in 2027. It’s not clear exactly what the cost will be, but Gross convinced Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, to donate $100,000 worth of Cloudflare credits to any startup that builds on Idealab’s platform.

Gross said he is hoping idealab.ai will eventually catalyze 1 million new businesses and generate 100 million new jobs—enough to offset the 100 million jobs that Goldman Sachs once forecast that AI could eliminate from existing companies by 2030. (So far, there’s not much sign the job picture is going to be as bleak as Goldman suggested). Gross said these new entrepreneurial jobs would be better jobs too. “These would be 100 million jobs that are much, much better than the 100 million jobs that were displaced, giving people more purpose and more excitement and more enthusiasm and more passion, and actually solving world problems,” he said.

Whether or not Idealab can help create 100 million jobs, there’s mounting evidence that AI may be helping to create a golden age of entrepreneurship. New business formation in the U.S. is near all-time highs, up some 11% since the pandemic ended in 2022, according to Census Bureau data. The situation is similar in other parts of the world. So the economic picture AI is helping to paint is more complex—and perhaps less dystopian—than the vision of fewer jobs and more concentrated wealth that has received the most media attention so far.

With that, here’s more AI news.

Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn

Before we get to the news, just a reminder to check out our new vodcast, Fortune AI Weekly. This week, Bea Nolan and I discuss our exclusive interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic’s research on whether small models could self-replicate, and Anthropic’s decision to ban users from being abusive to Claude. You can check out the vod here on YouTube.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com