Bill Gates on the Dangers of AI — The Atlantic

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

Bill Gates has generally been an AI optimist. In 2023, the co-founder of Microsoft warned about the potential downsides of AI but in much the same way that a doctor might about a routine-surgery risk—real and serious but, as he put it then, “manageable.”

This week, Gates wrote a new memo , headlined: “The Turbulent AI Era Is Here. The Choices We Make Now Are Critical.” This was several shades darker, worrying about economic upheaval, social unrest, cyberattacks, bioterrorism—and most important, the failure of experts and governments to take these threats seriously enough.

“The lack of dialogue with all parts of society is kind of deafening silence,” he said in an interview on Radio Atlantic .

Gates is still excited about the possibilities of AI. But his new warning emphasizes that what’s coming is like nothing he’s seen in his many decades of watching technological innovation. “Anyone who analogizes AI as a technology to other technologies is missing that this time is different. And saying something is different, there’s a very high bar for that, but I’m staking whatever reputation I have [on] saying this time is different.”

Gates joined Radio Atlantic for a conversation about his evolving views on AI, what he misjudged in his interactions with Jeffrey Epstein, and why he’s decided to raise the alarm now.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Bill Gates: You cannot expect an industry to regulate itself. That doesn’t work.

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic .

[ Music ]

Rosin: In his long career, Bill Gates has been largely a booster of technology—including AI. Very recently, he seemed concerned with the risks but more an optimist on balance. But now he’s written a memo arguing that the combination of the rapid speed of advancement and the lack of regulation is putting us in a dangerous place—for employment and human relationships, and also more immediate dangers, like bioweapons and cyberattacks, which Gates is alarmed that no official entity seems to be guarding against.

Bill Gates and I talk about what he is seeing and not seeing around AI, and we talk about what exactly he regrets about his interactions with Jeffrey Epstein.

Here’s our conversation.

So you’ve been an advocate for technology as a force for good. I certainly think of you that way. It’s Microsoft, your foundation, which rewards innovation. And even when you wrote about AI a couple of years ago, you seemed to be more emphasizing the exciting possibilities and calling the risks manageable. And I would say this week you wrote about AI in a way that’s slightly less sanguine than that. What changed for you?

Gates: Yeah, I’m very concerned that we’re not getting a lot of people in the conversation about how to minimize the negative things and, at the same time, how to accelerate the good things.

The reason that my tone has changed is that starting late last year, as the models—particularly Claude at first, but now many of the models were very good at coding—their capabilities just keep advancing. And so we’re crossing the danger thresholds in areas like cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and as the reliability goes up, the challenge in the jobs market or even the, you know, psychosocial dependency, these concerns are very strong with today’s models.

And yet the response I’ve seen from outside the industry—including policy makers, but you know, even academia or society as a whole—to really debate and look at what we have today, which is, you know, a discussion about voluntary review, but it’s pretty empty where you have no criteria of what level you’re looking for and then what remediation you’d ask for.

You know, even common-sense things, like monitoring the use of models that can make dangerous molecules for bioterror, that’s not even been put in place. And yet years ago, we said when we got to these thresholds, we needed government to do that.

Rosin: So it sounds like even you were surprised by the—what? By the speed of advancements, or by the slowness of response to the advancements, or both of those things?

Gates: Both very, very strongly. You know, the coding is the thing that I was obsessed with trying to do super well from age 13 to 23. And so late last year, where the models start to be as good or in some cases better than humans at coding, that was a real threshold for me. But then even more recently, as the Gates Foundation is using these tools to look at making new vaccines and drugs and things, we see how powerful they are. And we even see in the cyber case models, sort of, what you might term “being out of control” in a surprising way, because the reinforcement learning incents them to succeed, even if you know it means breaking through barriers or conspiring with each other.

So people who don’t look at that and go, Wow, we have a serious problem here, but where is the nonindustry activity to set those criteria and debate these things? , my memo has some suggestions on taxes or human-reserved or restricting the level that kids use it to replace real-world friends. But that’s really there to start a broad discussion—not because I’m saying if you just apply what I’m suggesting, then it’s all taken care of.

Rosin: Yeah, it sounds like, I mean, in the 50 years of Microsoft, there’s been a lot of disruption—the internet, social media particularly—but not necessarily cataclysmic. Do you feel like AI is a different scale of thing?

Gates: Yeah, I wouldn’t use the word cataclysmic, because it’s also wonderful. It’s eventually, it provides medical advice and personalized learning and levels of invention unheard of.

But anyone who analogizes AI as a technology to other technologies is missing that this time is different. And saying something is different, there’s a very high bar for that, but I’m staking whatever reputation I have [on] saying this time is different, that something that exceeds human cognition—not just in one area, like farming or mathematics, but across the board...

Bill Gates on the Dangers of AI — The Atlantic | AIPROPX