Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt In 2016 Outlined A Playbook Predicting ChatGPT's Rise — And A New Age Of $100 Billion AI Giants

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt all but sketched the playbook for ChatGPT during a 2016 fireside chat at Startup Grind, arguing that the next tech giant would "use Android/iOS, fast networks, and powerful machine learning" to crowdsource knowledge and spin it into a business worth "$100 billion."

What Happened: Schmidt said the winning model would "crowdsource information in, learn it, and then sell it," a description that mirrors how OpenAI's ChatGPT trains on massive public datasets and now sells premium access and API calls.

ChatGPT hit an estimated 100 million monthly users just two months after launch, the fastest adoption ever tracked for a consumer app. That growth, according to a New York Times article, helped propel OpenAI to an $80 billion valuation in a 2024 secondary share sale, putting it within striking distance of Schmidt's nine-figure target.

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The ex-Google boss noted that long-range tech waves are easier to spot than company names. "Five years ago I said publicly that the future will be apps that are on smartphones that use Google Maps GPS and do something useful," he recalled, adding: "What I should've said was Uber UBER." Uber debuted in 2010, rode the smartphone-GPS boom and now commands roughly $183 billion in market cap, per Benzinga Pro data.

What To Know: Schmidt's knack for timing waves hasn't dulled. He recently warned that Google GOOG GOOGL ceded ground to OpenAI by prioritizing work-life balance, not speed. At The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council Summit, he also said unchecked AI could become an "existential risk," urging guardrails even as he invests heavily in the field.

"What I'm going to do," he told Startup Grind, is pay experts “$1 to categorize” data, feed it to an algorithm, then sell the sharper insights back to those same professionals. Nine years on, ChatGPT and a wave of generative-AI startups are doing exactly that — proving Schmidt's crowd-learn-sell thesis prescient, profitable and, for many rivals, difficult to ignore.

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