AI Gold Rush Prompts Some College Students to Drop Out
Govind Gnanakumar was in diapers when Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. Like the Meta founder, he won’t wait for a university diploma to start his business. The 19-year-old dropped out of the Georgia Institute of Technology in May to focus full time on his artificial-intelligence startup, Automorphic.
He is among a swarm of teenagers and 20-somethings leaving college behind to capitalize on a gold rush in AI. The debut of ChatGPT and Bard brought the faraway promises of conversational, helpful AI closer to reality, setting off a rush of investment and new companies that automate tasks and transform work. More than 25% of Americanstartup investments have gone to AI companies so far this year, according to Crunchbase, an industry tracker.
The size of the market for generative-AI applications—$43 billion for enterprise-technology AI alone this year, according to PitchBook—and the rapid pace of development have young founders ditching class and jumping in. Numbers of dropouts-turned-founders aren’t tracked, but several founders accepted to this summer’s cohort by Y Combinator, a prominent startup accelerator program, left campus for their companies. Investors generally praise dropouts’ hustle but note that a great many of the ventures will fizzle out.
Among those accepted into Y Combinator is Gnanakumar’s company, which employs four people. The program is as good as a degree, he reasons. His business aims to create AI tools that can answer complex questions in specialized subjects, such as genomics or patent law.
“Someone is going to get their jobs automated away. I’d rather be doing the automating," says Gnanakumar. Venture capitalists say that dropouts’ desire to seize this moment in tech has parallels with prior
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