Mr. Gates, welcome back to Meet the Press.
It's wonderful to have you. We really appreciate you taking the time. It's a busy week. I want to start off by talking about the initiative that you have announced this week. It aims to address one of the biggest concerns about AI, which is the equity in the AI space, the language barrier. AI is mostly built for English speakers, and so the Gates Foundation is partnering, if I'm right, with 60 other organizations, including AI companies, to expand language accessibility. Why do you think this is an important initiative? Why now?
AI models have gotten very good at recognizing English and about a dozen other mainstream languages. And so as you talk about your health, it's going to accurately record that and be able to help you. In African languages, the error rate will be about 10 times higher. And so that's very dangerous. You know, take Yoruba, which is 3 million people in Western Africa. You have 10 times the error rate that you have in English, so it's really not usable. And yet, you know, pure capitalistic incentives would not prioritize these languages. And so it was amazing. You know, we hoped to get 10 companies working with us, we ended up with 60. And so we have a very concrete timeline to improve the quality, to benchmark and then say, okay, this is good enough, you can do a health interview or an education session in this language.
What does the timeline look like? What does success look like in your eyes?
Well, over the five years we want to take every language that a million or more people speak and have it be close to English language quality. And so you could say that a patient, or a farmer, or a student, it makes sense for them to use that audio interface, you know, talking about their crops and the challenges they face. And so, you know, this is extremely well defined how we measure the quality, what data we need, and all of the model providers will then take the data and so these capabilities will show up in every single AI model.
Have you been surprised by how quickly AI has been able to grasp language capabilities in the first place? Is that one of the aspects of it that's been surprising as someone who's worked in this space?
Well, certainly, when you go back to the, when ChatGPT came along, I had challenged the people at OpenAI to take a test, like an Advanced Placement Biology test. And it was one of the more amazing demos ever in my life when we saw that. So six months before it was released, we saw how good it was at language. Language is actually a perfect application for the architecture we use here. And so, you know, the idea that all the world's languages can be supported is actually pretty straightforward.
And does that give you optimism that you can in fact meet the benchmarks that you've laid out for these five years?
Yeah, of all the problems in AI, this one, it's clear what we need to do. It's clear how we do it. It's clear, you know, it's over 3 billion people whose languages are currently very, very poorly represented. So almost half the world is getting far, far worse quality than we experience.
So let's talk about this moment in AI development. You are one of the voices who's been warning about the potential risks. You wrote in August, quote, 'AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented or the worst source of injustice.' How serious are the risks posed by AI, do you believe?
Well, AI is not just a new technology. And that's why people who say, okay, past technologies, there was all this worry and, you know, by and large, it all worked out, so maybe this time all these warnings that we have to shape it intentionally are unnecessary. This is truly an evolutionary event. You know, we have created an intelligent species that in many respects is already smarter than we are and over the next several years at kind of exponentially improving level will be insanely smarter than we are. You know, the ability to transfer knowledge, there's no sort of individual boundaries like humans having to educate each other. And so I can't say strongly enough how much society, not just the companies, but every academic, think tank, voter, policymaker, need to really engage on how we want to shape this technology. You know, there's no such thing as being too focused on accelerating the good potential and minimizing some truly horrific bad things that could happen.
You say something that is truly noteworthy, that in some ways AI is already smarter than we are. Is it possible that AI is already out of human control?
No. Humans still have control of AI.
What gives you confidence?
Well, the AIs, they're not running millions of robots yet, you know, so their ability. You know, we can turn off the computer. And the most dangerous thing we're facing right now is people with bad intent using the AI. You know, so somebody who wants to defraud an individual or wants to shut down the electric network or, you know, scramble bank accounts, they are now empowered. Historically, countries, you know, had cyber attack teams and they could think of things like bioterror weapons. Now small groups with AI can do what only the biggest countries could do. So it's really the bad intent plus AI that looms as a major threat unless governments insist on various safeguards. You know, we will see a lot of big negative things because we're not safeguarding.
The big headline in recent weeks as it relates to AI was a whistleblower, as you know, within the industry sounding the alarm, warning in an online post. I'll read a part of it: 'The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.' Do you believe AI is powerful enough to end all of humanity?
AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths. You know, so even though it's pretty hard to get to 100%, there's never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools. And it's great that there's this discussion with the industry almost against their interest admitting these things. The problem is that the rest of the world is either discounting this or just thinking of this as a competition. And it's very scary that we don't have, you know, all of the thinkers saying how do we want to shape this.
So how should people be thinking about this warning from the AI whistleblower who says that AI is strong enough to destroy all of humanity? What should be done in this moment?
Well, certainly, you've got to deal with the near-term risk, which is that these models enable extremely strong cyber attacks, extremely strong defrauding individuals. And so AI, instead of just running, you have to build the safeguards in, including monitoring where you're watching what the AI is doing. You know, law enforcement is going to get called up, you know, on all these fraud events or transmission shutdown events, and their ability to see what's going on is going to be nil unless the monitoring and safeguards are built into the AI. And so that is a super urgent thing. It won't slow us down that much. You know, that's another debate, should we slow down or not, but deciding to put the safeguards and monitoring in, that's a choice we have. And the only question is do we do that before or after there's some large-scale cyber attacks or bioattacks.
You take me to my next question, which is the debate about what to do. There's a debate over should there be a kill switch that is imposed. Others are suggesting a total pause, as you note, on AI development. And there are some who say companies can regulate themselves. How do you believe AI should be regulated?
Well, unfortunately, most dangerous technologies the government understands because they funded the research or they're an important customer for nuclear bombs or rockets or things like that. AI has emerged from the private sector, and so the depth of understanding of these dangerous thresholds that were crossed literally this year, bioattack capability, cyber attack capability, and others, you have so little expertise in the government. And you know, because it's cast in this nationalistic, you know, us versus them type thing, you have people who are saying, well, let's just go full speed ahead. It's completely irresponsible not to require every AI to have the safeguards and monitoring capabilities. And it only is a question of do you do it now. This may, you know, the effort to do that won't slow things down in a meaningful way. After all, we're on this exponential increase. So you know, it ought to be common sense to build the safeguards in. But you know, we don't yet have, people look to the US for leadership on tough issues, usually that's benign leadership bringing people in, and they're a little confused when that's not taking place.
Are you saying that the safeguards should be implemented?
Absolutely. It's the world's most obvious thing. I mean, you know, Anthropic reported on people trying to come in and create bioweapons or targeting capabilities using their AI. There's all sorts of very sophisticated fraud things that you don't need, you know, people in Cambodia typing messages. The AI is 1000 times better than that. And so these negatives are imminent because they have really strong business models behind them.
And I want to be really clear, make sure I understand what you mean by safeguards. You talk about putting monitors in place. There's also a discussion about a kill switch. Is a kill switch possible? Is that realistic at this point?
The kill switches, that's kind of a weird thing. It's not enough to have a kill switch. They're not yet at the point where they autonomously grab computers and, you know, can't be shut down. So that discussion just sort of shows how non-technical various people are. You know, I would never want to say I'm against the kill switch, but you don't, when you're trying to moderate the bad behavior, you need insight and records of what's being done. So the kill switches alone would not prevent these tragedies.
What would prevent tragedies from happening due to AI specifically?
I wish it was easier to distinguish good intent, like I want to design a new drug for a disease, versus negative intent, which is I want to design a tool of bioterrorism. Because those are so close. We do need to monitor any sophisticated model and record exactly what's being done. The United States ought to make sure this is done. China will want to do this. Usually people expect the US to be very concrete about what this looks like. And you'll hear from the industry it's a very doable thing. It would not slow them down dramatically. And so the safeguards and monitoring are separate from would we be better off slowing down.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently called on AI companies to slow model development to try to mitigate risks. Do you think self-regulation is sufficient, or does it need to be accompanied by legislation in Washington?
