And joining me now is Microsoft co-founder and chair of the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates. Thanks so much for joining us. We've already seen these AI models go rogue and hack platforms and government websites. These are just the incidents we know of. I can't imagine there aren't many, many more we don't know about. You know many of these tech leaders personally. Do you think they're being fully transparent and fully sincere with the public when it comes to their own concerns and fears with this technology and the true risks?
Well, I don't think there's any industry that's ever been as open about their concerns. The imbalance we have is you have a lot of concern in the industry, but then academics, policy makers, politicians, they have far less awareness of how complex and how powerful these tools are. And so as that awareness develops, a lot of policy sophistication will come in. For example, should kids have an emotional relationship with the AI? How can the AI complement the teachers in school and, you know, be more of a thing to drive curiosity than just a tool basically for cheating on an essay or a paper? And, you know, if you look at various countries, China's banned, you know, children having relationships with the AI. There's some that are much further ahead, and some of the negatives that I think the industry is trying to get attention to.
You have called AI aliens created in a lab that could evolve almost as a species of its own and become to us what, quote, we are to dogs or cats, unquote. And you've said this isn't just a technological leap. It's a quote, evolutionary event. That sounds scary. That sounds ominous.
Yes. The arrival of AI is both fantastic for things like health care and new tools, you know, really unbelievable, but it's also something that has such profound power and really changes life in a pretty profound way that I always worry when people look back at previous technological advances. You know, like I was involved in the personal computer and the internet, those were a big deal. But nothing compared to this. You know, this changes the world more than all previous technologies. And we got to get everyone on the same page about what a big deal this is.
And you've warned that AI could make it much easier for bad actors to develop deadly bioweapons. You said the risk of having a bioterrorist attack is now 50 times the risk of a natural pandemic. How soon do you think that nightmare scenario could happen? Are we talking imminently? And are our leaders doing enough to make sure it does not happen?
Well, no, we're not doing enough. The front that we'll probably see most dramatically in the next year is cyber attacks because there's a known business model where, you know, you threaten to do something and ask somebody to pay you for that, or, you know, create a disruption that changes something in the stock market or some betting thing that you go and do. And so, the real danger right now is not the AI getting out of control. We need to work on that, but that's years away in terms of the big impact that might have. It's really bad people using AI, particularly in AI where you can take out all the safeguards. You know, we put in safeguards to try and avoid you doing cyber attacks. We put safeguards in to avoid you doing bioterrorism, but right now you're allowed to take all those safeguards out. So when you have bad people, no safeguards, and then the latest models, that's where over the next year, primarily in cyber, we are going to have a lot of negative surprises.
Sam Altman called some of the scenarios that people are envisioning about AI, quote, so dystopian that they sound like the plot of bad science fiction movies, unquote. He warned against people falling into, quote, the trap of doomerism, unquote. Now you've called AI the most dangerous thing ever that makes nuclear weapons look like nothing. Sam Altman, it sounds like, would suggest that you are falling into the trap of doomerism. How would you respond?
Well, all responsible AI leaders, including Sam Altman, including Dario Amodei, they are telling the world this is very concerning. The way that gets articulated in terms of potential negative scenarios, yes, it can get overblown when people act like all of humanity is at risk in some intimate way. That is going too far. But say compared to cars or planes or drugs, you know, all things that I think we're pleased that we have significant regulatory capability to try and keep people safe, this is more dangerous than any of those. And so, you know, there are some grim possibilities if we don't maintain control. And I do think the industry is doing its job to raise the alarm bell. But this idea that if we're judicious, we can minimize these risks, maybe that's not coming across particularly because the government sometimes, you know, goes to the extreme of let's not have any safeguards or let's completely stop this. You know, finding that middle ground like we did with planes and cars and medicines, that we don't have a lot of sophistication right now, but I do believe that middle ground exists.
