Sam Altman said we're not far from a one-person billion dollar company. What he didn’t expect was that it would be started by this Aussie designer.
Two weeks ago, Aussie artist and designer Rhett Dashwood almost fulfilled this prediction, with his crypto token Turbo reaching a market cap of AUD $908 million.
In an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in February, Sam Altman said “In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends there’s this betting pool for the first year there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would’ve been unimaginable without AI. And now [it] will happen.”
Two weeks ago, Aussie artist and designer Rhett Dashwood almost fulfilled this prediction, with his crypto token (memecoin) Turbo, which was created using ChatGPT.
On May 29th the $TURBO coin reached a market cap of USD $610.74m, which on that day was worth AUD $908 million. So close!
While writing this post, I DM’d Rhett to get his thoughts and he replied;
“I had been thinking a lot about this quote from Sam and wondering what this would look like, until it hit me, wait, maybe I'm the guy he's talking about.”
Rhett is the sole creator of Turbo, and he developed the memecoin with help from ChatGPT in April 2023. In his own words he “gave GPT-4 a budget of $69 and asked it to make the next great meme coin”. And it did! The success of Turbo shows the potential of generative AI to augment and scale up an entrepreneur's personal abilities and vision. He used ChatGPT to help with the name, the character, the code and even the methodology behind the launch of the token.
We were fortunate to have Rhett present at a Dazed & Diffused event we ran a year ago, not long after $TURBO had first taken off. He shared Toad's creation story, and Rhett’s reaction to being tweeted by Elon Musk. Fast-forward to May 2024 and Turbo is going to the moon.
So, will Rhett be the founder of the world’s first one-person billion dollar company?
To answer this, I admit I am taking some liberties with Sam’s prediction!
Firstly I am using Australian dollars (Sam didn’t say it had to be US dollars!) and Turbo is a cryptocurrency - not technically a company. Also (and probably more importantly) Turbo is supported by a strong community of volunteers / token holders. In typical company parlance are they more like employees, or like shareholders?
Toad, the mascot of $TURBO
Regardless if you think Rhett / Turbo meet Sam’s criteria (if you know him, please forward this to Sam Altman as I would love his opinion 😉), it rings true to the original premise. Before generative AI you needed a large team to reach a billion dollar valuation. Now, you can use tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to assist you to start and run your company, and the chatbots can serve as your virtual team.
Will Turbo become the first one-person “unicorn”? One more crypto market bull run and we’ll find out!
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A handful of Gen AI news
Here are five of the most interesting things we have seen and read in the last week;
Apple held their annual WWDC and revealed “AI: Apple Intelligence”, this is a 5 minute recap of the new AI features coming soon in Apple products
A research report by McKinsey on The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value.
A Replicate model for generating images of a given character in different poses
Turn academic papers into AI-generated audio discussions with Google Illuminate
Kling, a new text-to-video AI model was revealed, a Chinese rival to OpenAI’s Sora?
That’s a wrap for Issue #20. Drop us some feedback below.