This is ultra different than any technology that's come before.
You must have so many conversations behind the scenes. Do you feel that message is getting through there?
The rest of the world is not used to having a vacuum of US leadership.
This is a technology that it tends to concentrate power and I'm just wondering what your view is of this kind of generation of tech leaders. Do you think they are ready to meet this moment?
It's not the role of the industry to self-regulate or understand the whole of society impact that comes out of AI.
Hello and welcome to the interview from Times Tech, our weekly conversation with the people shaping the future of technology. I'm Katie Prescott.
And I am Danny Forson. And this week, Katie, we've got a big one.
Bill Gates. Bill Gates is on the pod. The one and only. His and his timing really couldn't be better.
It really couldn't. He is of course one of the world's leading technologists, one of the richest by the way, worth $14 billion and one of the most influential people on the planet. So when he puts his head above the parapet, people listen. And now he's sounding the alarm on AI's potential dangers and the lack of controls in place to stop them. And what a week to do it because you know we've had these just in the past few days these viral tweets from safety researchers at Anthropic warning that there is a greater than 10% chance that AI will quote kill all humans within the next decade. That is a direct quote. And that warning is of course the latest in a growing line going back to Sir Jeffrey Hinton, the godfather of modern AI who quit his job at Google 3 years ago, which in AI years feels like a hundred years ago, so that he can speak freely about the dangers of super powerful AI. But these warnings are getting more dire and more frequent with every passing month as this technology advances.
Yeah, I've rather lost count of the number of researchers who've left some of the leading labs because they're so worried about this. Now we have Gates adding his name to that list. And as you'll hear, he thinks AI is quote ultra different from any tech that's come before. And worse than that, that governments, universities, and the rest of society aren't listening to those warnings from the tech industry or understanding the tech properly at all. We also get into the risk to jobs, biocurity, whether AI is a bubble, and why he doesn't think that the tech companies themselves can be expected to sort all of this out. But we started first with the elephant in the room, his three-year association with Jeffrey Epstein, which he testified about to US lawmakers earlier this year. And now, here is our conversation with Bill Gates.
Well, look, there's a huge amount to talk about and we want to get into the report, all of your very stark warnings that you've issued about AI and many of the things that you talk about that crop up on our podcast, as you can imagine, week in week out, things that we hear from people who are at the front line of developing AI. But I just wanted to start by looking at the year just gone. You've experienced a huge amount of scrutiny because of your association with Jeffrey Epstein and I wondered how that was affecting the work that you want to do and what your reflections are on that.
You know, I was glad I got a chance to answer every question the committee had. You know, even went through the meetings that I had, about a dozen meetings. You know, I was trying to raise billions of dollars for global health and I thought he could refer me to those people and we could save millions of lives. In retrospect that was not only a dead end but a mistake in terms of you know the reputational risk and you know we live in a very reputationally sensitive world. You know I was able to make clear exactly what I was doing in terms of meeting with them and you know very clear that that's you know all that ever happened there. So you know I've learned a lot of lessons over time. You know I wouldn't even say you know I had antitrust difficulties. I had a divorce. You know, I'm heavily associated with the tech industry. You know, some things where people question me are things actually that didn't happen like views of, you know, vaccines, tracking people or stuff like that. But, you know, I'm a lot more careful about who I or the foundation associate with now. And, you know, I put a lot of thought into that. And you know it doesn't change anything about what the foundation's about or the partners we're working with.
Well, thank you for addressing that and I think you know to your point around this report the world's in a really interesting spot right now. And as the report lays out, especially around AI, there's incredible potential, but also huge negatives, right? And some pretty terrifying directions this can go. Do you feel like we're in a window, right? After which it will be too late, like we have to change course, we have to take action. So, that's one question. It's two parts. The other question is like of all of the things that could go wrong, what is the thing that most worries you that rises above everything else as we think about the arrival of this technology?
Well, eventually when the technology gets super good, including being embodied in humanoid robots, you know, perhaps more than 20 years from now, we'll have a world of abundance where food and shelter are provided at either no or extremely low cost because you know the robots, the materials, the invention of new medicines you know has just gone so far and there will have challenges in terms of how we organize society and purpose, meaning things of that nature. That's far enough off and you know probably is best thought about by young people. And so a lot of what I'm addressing is this very tumultuous period where AI is starting to affect jobs and creating cyber or bio or psychosocial risk or control risk that the last year the AIs have gotten powerful enough that those risks are here now. And you know I know as a close follower and you know very engaged with using these technologies and consulting with the industry itself that they're going to get far more powerful even before the end of the year because the hardware and software layers are getting a lot better. And so I do find myself a bit surprised that the segments of society outside the industry, the universities, the think tanks, both in terms of their use and their sophistication about moderating downsides, they're really not in the conversation. And if we don't have that deep thinking there on things including how it affects kids or the job market, then you'll have just kind of this black and white, okay, let's ban it all, which then all of the good stuff would be at risk there. And so I'm really surprised it's not more top of mind. And that's, you know, the memo I did last week was to try to raise, you know, say there should be this visibility. The Goalkeepers report is more me, you know, as the full-time chairman of the Gates Foundation talking about how profoundly using AI is influencing our ambition and allowing us, you know, to say, 'Okay, we're going to get to farmers in a better way. We're going to get new medical tools a lot faster.' So, it's, you know, that's mostly on trying to accelerate the positive impacts where a country with, you know, far far too few doctors, this really is kind of miraculous if it gets implemented and funded the right way.
It does feel to me that a lot of what you were saying in your memo, but also in the report is trying to very publicly shake people out of complacency. It's like you just said, you know, you're worried people just it's not top of mind for so many people, but you must have so many conversations behind the scenes with leaders in government and tech leaders. Do you feel that message is getting through there?
No, I'm afraid that a lack of usage, a sense that hey, past technologies weren't so disruptive and this is just another technology. Just this intuitive sense of okay, humans are really smart. This thing is going to peak out at some level. You know, I heard it messed up this or that thing. And that, you know, maybe that's a permanent flaw that will hold it back. There's a lot of reasons why the message that this time is different and this is more profound than any technology that people would resist that. And you know that's why I'm putting you know all of my experience and credibility behind the message that it is very different and it requires this broad engagement. I'd say the industry in terms of, you know, at least raising the ideas that there can be harms, I'd say they do pretty well at that. And they alone though are not going to self-regulate because there's many of them and you know some are in the US, some are in China, some are in other locations and you know so just when people talk about well you know what are the disagreements in the industry that doesn't lead to the solution for all of society.
Are you kind of hoping to some degree that there a bubble does burst? And what I mean the bubble, I'm actually talking about the, you know, the financial bubble that is being inflated around this. When you talk about the hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars that are just rushing into the industry, a lot of it is debt. We've seen this movie before. Is there a hope on some level that if that blows up maybe that will be almost like a natural break and give us time to adjust?
No, I'm not hoping for some financial thing and you know that's among the topics can distract people. You know, is this stock undervalued or overvalued? And are we building too few data centers or too many data centers? The AI is in no way a bubble in the sense of like the South Sea bubble or the tulip market bubble. AI is a very very profound technology. Now often when you get new technologies even you know cars, planes, the internet you have some investments that you can look back on you know say pets.com or something and say wow that was pretty excessive of not understanding the competitive dynamics of you know what was real value added of the industry but AI, you know thinking about what stocks to buy or sell okay you can do that but that's a distraction from the recognition that this is ultra different than any technology that's come before and it will change how invention gets done. It'll change life in a huge way. And that's even before the humanoid robots come in and bring the physical capabilities on top of the cognition capabilities that are on this, you know, huge ramp. That financial channel won't lead you to, oh, we need to have faster adoption in health and in education. You know I'm trying to accelerate the positive uses and then minimizing the risk of the bad ones and the cyber risk is there today. And you know even if stocks went down that doesn't eliminate the cyber risk.
It's really striking in the report you talk about increasing adoption as you just did and the importance of localized AI. So how you know AI for in different countries in different cultures needs to be relevant to where it's being used. So I don't know AI needs to be in Chichewa in Malawi not necessarily just in English. But how do you persuade the tech companies that are developing it to do that and sort of pursue good over profit and should we be doing that?
The four companies that the Gates Foundation's engaged with, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, they're not falling short in terms of wanting to help with beneficial use. You know, OpenAI has this gigantic foundation. Anthropic is helping with a lot of our work. Same thing with Google and Microsoft. And so, you know, they will provide back-end capacity to the degree we go out and figure out how to get the African language supported. They'll do that without it necessarily being profitable for them. But you know, they don't understand Africa and African farmers. And so you know the Gates Foundation partnering with African governments and other donors will make sure that the data about health from Africa, the agriculture weather data gets put together in an easy to use format. We'll even have benchmarks in health and agriculture to make sure that the local ways things are discussed are that these models are very well trained. But the so the philanthropic intent of these companies I'd say is quite strong but again relying on them to understand about kids growing up and how much they should depend on AI and what's tasteful there and not tasteful there. These are not social scientists or psychiatrists and they will naturally even though they try to avoid it, they'll bring some industry bias. That is why the economists and social scientists you know broadly the whole of academia should be way more engaged on AI so that eventually you get policy ideas and you get the politicians having a more nuanced view than hey I'm for AI or I'm against AI.
On that point, do you know this is a technology that I mean as we're seeing with OpenAI, Anthropic and just like these kind of unheard of growth rates it tends to concentrate power and I'm just wondering what your view is of this kind of generation of tech leaders. Do you think they are ready to meet this moment? In other words, do you trust that this is going to go well? Because as you say right now it's a little bit there's very few guard rails. It's kind of like we're in their hands to a degree.
They are not experts on biocurity. They're hiring in people and all that but that's not their responsibility. You know, we have a gigantic government budget and you know, which has had deep expertise on bio security and cyber and you know, we really need to activate that. Again, I don't The flaw in this picture is not that the companies aren't concerned or, you know, that they're not thoughtful about these issues. And I can only speak to the four that the foundation is deeply engaged in. That's not the flaw. The flaw is that the safeguards which are going to be democratically determined but not you know just a knee-jerk thing rather deep policy thinkers you know saying okay does the token tax make sense how would it work you know kids shouldn't be banned from using AI but what are the boundaries that will make it a net positive where it's helping their curiosity and giving them feedback but not retarding the challenges of social development. You know, that's way outside what these companies are focused on. They're going, you know, very quickly and amazingly in terms of the depths of the models. And so, you know, where is society engaging on this? It's not the role of the industry to self-regulate or understand the whole of society impact that comes out of AI.
And you've talked about the creation of some sort of international organization to manage AI's use and monitor AI and the importance of getting the US and China involved in that. Have you got a sense of where the leadership for something like that should come from, how it should emerge?
Well, since World War II, the US has often been a benign leader of global initiatives. You know, whether it's the creation of the UN itself with others, you know, thinking about nuclear weapons or ozone layer or aviation safety. And so here if you know if people see this as as important as I do the capacity of the US government to work domestically and in a friendly way reach out to others you know and see what they're doing.
Just doesn't feel that's the way the administration is going.
The depth of understanding of AI and the right concern about some of these bad things is too low in every entity including the government other than the industry itself. There's not many industries that have been like wow our tool we'll have to be careful with and that's very appropriate here because it is you know so uniquely powerful but you know OpenAI and even DeepMind talked about well if we got to a certain level we'd have to go beyond profit motives in terms of when and how we release these things now a lot of the design of how that might be exercised was kind of assuming there'd be one company out in front and so if they manage to hold back, you know, then that would solve the thing. That's not the world we're in. We're in a world with many companies in the United States, many companies in China and some elsewhere and so it'll have to be the right tradeoffs will have to come from outside the industry.
So, do you think it's credible though that for the companies, you know, because there in a way it feels like the industry is talking out of both sides of its mouth. It's like we're building this thing that might destroy humanity. Literally, like there's a non-zero chance. Please stop us. In the meantime, we're going to go as fast as possible. Does that that is a hard thing for people to get their heads around.
