Bill Gates has a good feeling about AI

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Netflix

Bill Gates has spent billions funding technologies he thinks will shape the future — from fighting climate change to eradicating disease.

Gates gets into the thick of it all in a new Netflix series called “What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates.” It launches on September 18th with episodes on AI, climate change, inequality, misinformation, and global health.

The Verge spoke with Gates to discuss what makes him so optimistic about the technologies covered in the series. And we couldn’t resist asking him about his days leading Microsoft, too.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

In the first episode, you ask ChatGPT to recommend an exercise you can do in your office. Do you use ChatGPT in your day-to-day life, and if so, how?

Well, actually, not for exercise, although that was a good example where it gave quite a good answer.

You know, I’m often learning about topics, and ChatGPT is an excellent way to get explanations for specific questions. I’m often writing things, and it’s a huge help in writing. I’d say the feature I use the most is the meeting summary, which is integrated into [Microsoft] Teams, which I use a lot. The ability to interact and not just get the summary, but ask questions about the meeting, is pretty fantastic.

Do you think Microsoft should expand its partnership with OpenAI or invest more in its own tech?

I’m an adviser to Microsoft. It’s strengthening the OpenAI relationship, doing a lot of its own. I mean, the amount of investment by Microsoft and others in the field, it’s hard to overstate.

And this comes up in this series — what about all the prophecies of doom? Are you worried about AI destroying the world?

Well, the near-term issues are more using it in a positive way, in areas like health and education. Even in the United States, we have shortages. The idea of the personal tutor, which I’ve been out in Newark to see Khanmigo [Khan Academy’s AI tool], which is based on ChatGPT. Seeing how great that is to help the teachers do their jobs, help the students who are behind or ahead stay engaged. So, for the next decade, we’ll be experiencing increased productivity in a lot of areas, which is overwhelmingly very good news.

As it gets more powerful, and you know, as bad guys are using it, there’ll be issues. But overall, I believe that it’s a beneficial thing, and we need to just shape it in the right way.

Disinformation, that’s something that researchers are also concerned about AI supercharging. Have you given any thought into how you would feel if generative AI tools that Microsoft has worked on have a significant impact on disinformation, on things like climate change and global health?

I think AI, on balance, is super beneficial to work on climate. People can type misinformation into a word processor. They don’t need AI, you know, to type out crazy things. And so I’m not sure that, other than creating deepfakes, AI really changes the balance there. In fact, I’d say that as people talk about reducing misinformation, the role of AI can be a positive role in terms of looking at what’s going on in a superefficient way.

Most of the problems in the series — like how we should think about AI, how we can get rid of malaria and improve global health, and various climate innovations — there’s things that I’m working on that are a big part of solving the problem. Misinformation is the one where I do think the younger generation is going to have to look at the tradeoffs between free speech and misinforming people.

Training AI uses a lot of energy. How do you square that with your ambitions on combating climate change, especially as Microsoft’s greenhouse gas emissions grow?

Microsoft and the other tech companies are very committed to finding clean energy sources, and so they’ll be pioneering customers, even for things like geothermal or fission or fusion, to help bootstrap that green energy generation. The actual increase from the AI data centers, even in the extreme view, would be well under 10 percent.

So, the net benefit we’re getting from AI helping us in our scientific discovery of, okay, how do you make steel? How do you make meat? What’s the weather going to be like? The AI benefits exceed the fact that that’s just another electricity load, but not a load nearly as big as electric cars or electric heat pumps or switching the industrial economy to use electricity instead of direct use of hydrocarbons.

You’ve funded technologies that some activists call “false solutions” to climate change because capturing carbon doesn’t get rid of fossil fuels or the other pollution they cause. And nuclear energy is kicking up a fight over uranium mining near Indigenous communities. How do you address those concerns with climate tech?

I’m a big believer that nuclear energy can help us solve the climate problem, which is very, very important. There are designs that, in terms of their safety or fuel use or how they handle waste, I think, minimize those problems.

This can become — although it’s not today — very inexpensive electricity, either using fission or fusion. So, we need to make sure we’re tasteful in how we do mining, how we store the waste. But we need those technologies.

You’re going to need non-weather-dependent sources that can be near to where the electricity loads are to complement an extreme build-out of renewables.

Fission, we can make it cheap. TerraPower is a company trying to show we can make a much safer, but much cheaper form of fission. [Editor’s note: Gates is founder and chairman of the Board of TerraPower.] And people are appropriately skeptical because it’s never been done. But they’ll get to see as we build that plant, and if so, it can make a contribution.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/24235730/bill-gates-ai-climate-change-energy-tech-microsoft-netflix