Inside the $50 Trillion AI Gold Rush | Episode 1

There's this new thing called AI. AI is artificial intelligence. It's all anyone wants to talk about. AI. AI. AI. Right now is the time to harness the availability of AI. This is the greatest technology I have ever seen. The type of innovations that we're seeing are mind-blowing. We're trying to make death optional. I'm building a drone company. I call them BroBot. We're definitely in a gold rush. People don't even want to create billion-dollar companies. They're talking about trillion-dollar companies here. A billion-dollar company is not interesting for us. How can I extract as much gold as possible? So what if we hosted the largest hackathon there ever was? And that's exactly what we did. Morning, guys. Day one of building a revolutionary music app. This is my idea. We are building a project with Bolt for the hackathon. We're excited to show you how it works. I'm going to stop the app and I'm just going to go to work. A billion people have the ability to turn their ideas into reality, into actual businesses, into actual products. It's all their own problems and the problems of the people around them in their communities. I made an app and I have zero idea how to code. Hi, I'm Sam. I have zero coding experience. And I just figured out what I'm going to do. What's at stake here is over a million dollars in prizes. Oh man, I'd love to win that. Good luck to everybody and we'll see you in 30 days. Are we ready to handle this? We've prepared a lot. you know, you just, you have no idea until, until you actually kind of hit the starting line. How are we going to actually pull this off? You are looking at Greg Eisenberg. G-R-E-G-I-S-E-N-B-E-R-G. And I am an AI clone of his voice. Title, CEO, company, late checkout. Greg runs a holding company that builds and invests in Internet companies. My mom gave me a journal of mine that I wrote in 1995. And in this journal, I said, I think computers are going to be everywhere in 2010. In addition to late checkout, Greg is an advisor to TikTok and Reddit. He has built and sold three venture-backed companies before the age of 30. I grew up in Montreal, Canada. As a kid, I was always into computers. I just remember being on the playground in elementary school and obsessing about the latest computer and how many megahertz it had. I feel a lot of entrepreneurs play World of Warcraft or play Counter-Strike or play StarCraft, these games, so competitive games was something I really liked. And then as I got older and I was whoa, I can connect to the whole world. At first I created a blog that was about games, right? So I had to learn how to code and I built this blog. And I think it was called The Game World. And it was just news about games. And then all of a sudden 10 people started going to it a day, 100 people started going to it a day, 1,000 people. I'm just getting comments from people all over the world. And it really just felt playing this game of building a product and putting it out there. The book that changed my life was a book called The Road Ahead by Bill Gates. In this book, Bill Gates basically outlined exactly what the future would look He talked about digital payments. He talked about watching videos on your phone. He talked about supercomputers on your phone. And this was in the mid-90s he wrote this. And I read it and I was just oh my God, this is the future. At this time, Montreal was kind of economically, it felt Detroit. It felt it was a struggling city. I just felt that, this is not a place for me. And my lottery ticket out of here is going to be this internet thing. So at first I didn't move to Silicon Valley right away because I was Canadian and I needed a visa. I started a company called Five Buy, which basically was the TikTok for you page before TikTok for you. I begged people to give me money. I raised $135,000 and people started downloading it, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. I basically faked it till I made it because people thought I lived in Silicon Valley, but I actually didn't. So I got a text early in the morning being hey, there's a party at the co-founder of PayPal's house. I think I could get you in. This is a dream come true for me. I look online, tickets are $5,000 to get from Montreal to San Francisco. and I look at my bank account and I had $5,100. And I was let's go. I get to this event and I'm kind of awkward. My friend who invited me didn't even show up. I go to the bar, I order a drink and this guy next to me asked me, hey, what do you do? And I was showing him if I buy the app. He goes that so cool I never seen anything that You know what though It does remind me of something You know StumbleUpon StumbleUpon was one of the largest social networks at the time Well this is StumbleUpon for video You should actually meet the CEO of StumbleUpon. He's right there. Can I introduce you? I meet with him. He says, I want to buy your company. But first, I need you to meet the chairman of the board and co-founder of StumbleUpon. In fact, he's a Canadian guy, too, who used to live in Montreal. Well, Garrett Kent. Now, Garrett, he started a little company called Uber. Who am I, right? I'm a guy with no connections, a guy with a gaming nerd, you know, just trying to get out of my town. All of a sudden, I'm meeting with Canada's biggest billionaire and I show him what I'm doing. And he's this looks great. I'd love to work with you on it. So I end up selling the company to stumble upon. And that's how I moved to San Francisco. They sponsored me and got me to the big leagues. Now that you know a little about the real me, let's talk about the artificial. So we're going to talk about AI today. It's the first technology that has no limit. It's going to be everything. AI is artificial intelligence. It's all anyone wants to talk about. And seemingly it's all that VCs want to invest in. It's a horizontal technology that is changing our civilization. It opened up this universe of opportunities and universe of problems that we can go solve. This is the greatest technology I have ever seen. It further levels the playing field of all humans to put their best ideas out there and turn them into reality. Think of it as digital brains. You have a digital brain that you can ask questions to. And if they're smart, if it's a good LLM, large language model, which is what powers the brain, then you're going to get a good response. Most people think AI is going to replace them. But in reality, it's just going to augment them and supercharge them. We assign these human- traits to these things. Reasoning, intelligence. These are very specific things that computers cannot do. And anyone who builds these models will tell you that. It's just the people on the commercial side, it is a good way to explain them, but it actually makes them seem more powerful than they are. And I'm worried that the people who are at the same time falling in love with these things are thinking that they're more powerful than they are. Maybe this is obvious, but artificial intelligence is smarter than human beings. We're at a stage where human beings versus the current LLNs are going to lose on 95% of tasks. Now, I know there's probably someone who's going to say but, you know, I saw that Will Smith video of him eating spaghetti and he had, you know, six fingers and he looked horrible. Well, things are changing. Things are changing. And it's 96% there. And it's going to be 97% in a month from now and 98% in two months from now. And it's only getting better from here. This week on 60 Minutes, we take a look at ChatGPT. Generative pre-trained transformer. Killer robots haven't taken over yet. This will be the greatest technology humanity has yet developed. AI changed everything in 2022 when ChatGPT came out. When ChatGPT came out and I actually, and I tried it, I was mind blown. It just probably everyone else in the world, right? Because it was clearly a paradigm shift. It took AI from being a little recommendation engine, cute, to, hey, I can have a conversation with this thing. And, whoa, this kind of feels I'm texting a really smart friend. And that was a huge aha moment for hundreds of millions of people. I can't remember if it was exactly when it hit 100-ish million users, but it was around that time where it just had this hockey stick. Silicon Valley reacted a kid in a candy shop. It really reset the industry. It kind of refactored how everyone was thinking. When OpenAI put it out, it was a low-key research prototype, is I think what they called it. And when it started getting millions of users that fast, I think everyone just realized, oh, there's something here. This is actually a product. It's not just research, which I think was how a lot of people viewed AI up until that point. It was either research or it was just the plumbing that made all these apps on our phones work, right? It was what was behind the ranking on your TikTok or Instagram feed. It's what made the Google search results come up. But it wasn't a thing we felt. And I think ChatGPT was a moment where people started to have feelings about AI. We've actually just expanded the universe of possible businesses. We can generate an infinite amount of interesting things This opens up the opportunity to build new prototypes and ship new AI products Founders said whoa that pretty cool I wonder if we can do this in a different space I wonder if we can add agents to it. What if we created ChatGPT but for images? What if we created ChatGPT but it was just incredible at writing? What if we can have agents that actually wrote code for you? bolt. And you're just starting to see the innovation start to happen. What I'm most excited about in AI is when I think back to how I was as a kid, and I was trying to ship these ideas in my head to get out of my hometown. I had to go through a lot of hoops to get there. Today, you don't need that. Today, anyone could spin up a digital team with these artificial intelligence and build stuff. I think you guys will be surprised by how quick you can spin one up. When I say spin up, I basically mean you're birthing almost a digital employee. In a short amount of time, you can build your own advanced personal assistant to save yourself time. Today, people call those AI agents. Let's first define what is an AI agent. You can give a task to a AI and it's going to go complete that task with an objective. I think we should be cautious with AI. Humanity is not approaching this issue with remotely the level of seriousness that would be required. AI clearly poses an imminent threat. I don't see a good outcome. I haven't yet really heard how any of the leaders wanting to build this feel about what it will do to the world. I mean, they talk about abundance and humans will have more time to do what they want to do, which is probably true in aggregate. But there's going to be a lot of downsides. These most advanced the eyes have tendencies for deception, cheating and maybe the worst self-preservation behavior. I think a bunch of bad stuff's going to happen. And by the way, a lot of bad stuff happened with the Internet, too. A lot of bad stuff happened with mobile. A lot of bad stuff happened with crypto. Anytime any new technology shift happens, bad stuff's going to happen. Clearly a lot of concern that AI could leave people jobless. How true is that and what does AI mean for the labor market? This is extremely true. I do think that a lot of people are going to get laid off. It is unquestionable. You're not going to lose your job to an AI, but you're going to lose your job to somebody who uses AI. I think that there's a window of time right now that people need to learn how to use these tools. People need to learn how to take what's in their head, use these tools and put it out there. Because no one could depend on whatever job that they have currently. But I will say that the people who figure out how to use these tools are going to come out of the other side of this, godlike, in the sense that they're going to be able to do things that they never dreamt was possible. I was talking to a pretty senior CEO in the AI space recently, and he was saying that, you know, really these days to succeed, you just have to use the tools. You too can learn and use this incredibly powerful skill. I'm going to show you the exact thinking principles. Stick with me and by the end, you will feel an AI master yourself. You know that the best way to learn is to get your hands dirty. Even the most advanced agents still come down to the same three components, brain, memory, and tools. Now, without further ado, let's get started. Treat this as a job. Putting in your daily calendar 90 minutes a day to be I'm going to go and futz around with whatever tool is probably the most impactful thing you can be doing right now. Essentially, I just decided to pivot completely. I completely sunsetted all my clients, committed to making no money, essentially, and just learning how to build apps with AI. I'm starting to play out with these AI tools and I'm thinking that maybe I should go take a course and be an AI researcher. If I were trying to take a first step into this world, I would just download every tool imaginable and play around with it. You know, there's so many. It's my phone home screen is just pages and pages of these apps now. We're at the stage where you can literally take a website app idea you have, throw it into Bolt, and it's going to design something for you and build it for you in a matter of seconds. Something that you'd have to hire a team of designers and engineers and spend millions of dollars on. Boom. Companies Bolt are happening everywhere, right, where teams can just create products and businesses without having the technical skills that you had to have, you know, even three years ago. What would take a month of engineering time can take literally five minutes. And so you can learn so much faster. And that's why you're seeing young people that aren't even out of college just ripping startup ideas never before. And not even young people anyone And that to me is what going on in Silicon Valley is there just an explosion of amazing amazing folks and amazing products being built at a rate that just is orders of magnitude faster Autonomous design and engineering is what's happening. We're seeing it with computer engineering, software engineering, but there's a bunch of other verticals that this is going to happen in. Literally pick a job, it's going to go more personalized and more autonomous. We have to teach everyone this. Hi Kelly, so we're hearing that AI startup Anthropic announcing a new fundraising round today at a blockbuster valuation. The company closed a $13 billion round that tripled its valuation to $183 billion. Another signal of just this investor demand that we're seeing in Silicon Valley. I think we're at the dawn of a brand new platform. We're starting what's really going to be a gold rush in terms of AI. We're definitely in a gold rush in terms of it's easier than ever to make money with AI. This is a glorious time to be building. We've all recognized the chat GPT moment, and we've all recognized that this is an AI gold rush. So it's basically a bunch of founders frantically trying to figure, how can I extract as much gold as possible? There are going to be a lot of opportunities. This is the time when all the money is going to get made. In the past in Silicon Valley, if you wanted to build a software on top of Windows, you would have to speak to the Microsoft Windows people and get your software on there. Now it's permissionless. Back in the day, there was no solo founder. You needed technical chops. You needed designers. The idea of a solo founder was a type dream. But today, I think the idea of a solo founder is actually the default. I think it's definitely made it so you can start a company with fewer people and automate more. And so you're seeing smaller and smaller teams. Especially at the seed stage, you're seeing companies with smaller teams than you were certainly in the mobile era. Being alone by myself on my laptop, you know, in my underwear, in a hotel room or something, I can ship very fast. We are 20 hours after the launch date. And my software already got 1.6 thousand users registered. People all across the world now have the opportunity to go and ship something with AI. Consumer is back. Can you think of any big mobile app company that has launched past 2017? I can't. The big companies had already been solidified, Snap, Instagram, TikTok. Those all had been solidified. But I think now it's back. It really bodes well for this next chapter of American innovation. I think it'll be less about a few places Silicon Valley and much more dispersed, which I think will be great for those entrepreneurs, great for those cities and really great for the country as well. I know there's people who say OK, Greg, yeah, but if everyone's a founder now, is it going to be a whole lot more competitive? Can anyone put something in? And now I'm just competing against millions of people. And it's yeah, there's actually going to be a lot more competition. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. You still have to be top 1%. You still have to have something to say. You still have to be able to connect with your community. You still need to be able to have an unfair advantage in some capacity. But that doesn't mean that it isn't way easier to be a founder. I'm pretty sure that I was talking to Eric and I was dude, you should do a hackathon. Let's do the biggest hackathon that there ever was. Maybe we'll fail, but let's try and do it. And I think he was interested. A month later. Hello, everybody. I'm KP. I see the KP tweet. If I was the CEO of Bolt or Lovable, I'd figure out a way to host the world's largest hackathon live and try to set a Guinness Book record in the sheer number of new web apps built in a day by people around the globe. Imagine 100,000 builders shipping. Find a couple top sponsors Anthropic or OpenAI, and bam, you have the marketing event of the year. My first reaction to KP's tweet was, yeah, let's do it. Eric retweeted it and said, hosted by at Greg Eisenberg. I never agreed to this. I've been working with my co-founder Albert since we were 13. We're kind of just builders at heart. That's why we ended up coming out to Silicon Valley because we wanted to build great products. Last year, in 2024, we were getting ready to shut the company down. When you're dealing with that sort of situation where it's are we going to shut down the company or what are the other outcomes? We're going to go and turn over every stone. And so Bolt was one of the things. It was the last thing. It was the last Bolt in the chamber of the company. It was the last idea we ran. We had to launch it in 90 days.