Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.
Few people were more vicious than Gates when he was running Microsoft. Maybe Larry Ellison but Gates was smarter and more cunning. I don't feel nostalgic about those days.
No because Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffery Epstein that entire time. I also feel like people forgot his insanely evil business practices from the 80s and 90s? Bill Gates has always been one of the worst people out there. Every bit as bad as Musk. It's a big club, we're just not in it.
If AI is really that powerful, shouldn't someone like Gates be able to end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure? Somehow "give people jobs" is the primary problem he wants to solve, not ending poverty. It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
> It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.<p>I wonder how the hell did you arrive at this conclusion from this text.
He is planning to leverage AI with significant capital expenditures:<p>> The Gates Foundation has 19 years left of the 20 years in which it will spend its remaining $200 billion. AI will help it achieve its ambitious goals by both accelerating the discovery of vaccines and medicines for HIV, TB, malaria, and malnutrition and helping the healthcare workforce and patients know how to use those tools. The foundation’s goals include cutting the number of children who die every year in half again, as was done from 2000 to 2024. All of our work, not just health but also agriculture and education, will take full advantage of AI.<p>---<p>I think "maintaining the working poor" is a strange misread of "give people jobs". His point is that people get a ton of meaning out of their work in our current capitalist system, and regardless of whether or not we change our system in the long term, if we don't do something about jobs in the short term, there will be a civil crisis:<p>> In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.<p>> When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.<p>> Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.
Gates is worth about $100B, Elon Musk about $850B. Let's call it $1T altogether. That would be at most about $115 per human on Earth (~8.5B humans). Not sure that is sufficient to "end hunger and homelessness."
It’s not like giving that money to people is the only option. you can spend it in projects that produce food, build low cost houses, etc.
That not even enough for DoorDash in Seattle.
let's set aside for a second the fact that this is not how things work, but you are off by an order of magnitude
1 trillion divided by 8.5 billion is $117. Global GDP is around $126T, so accumulated wealth of less than 1% of global GDP can barely move the needle.
> you are off by an order of magnitude<p>On which figure?
Not sure which number you're questioning, but it all looks right to me:<p>$852.7B[0] + $109.9B[0] = $962.6B ~= $1T ($1,000,000,000,000)<p>World population ~= 8.3B (8,300,000,000)[1]<p>$1,000,000,000,000 / 8,300,000,000 people = $120.481927711 per person[2]<p>[0] <a href="https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/" rel="nofollow">https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=%241%2C000%2C000%2C000%2C000+%2F+8%2C300%2C000%2C000" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=%241%2C000%2C000%2C000%2C000...</a>
All of this is truly bizarre, I hope that we can make sense of this craze in the future.<p>Maybe it will be seen similarly to the dancing crazes of the Middle Ages.
I think it will be seen similar to the crypto craze to be honest. People on this very site, with an actual reputation, were telling us non stop how we were losers who were going to be left behind and stay poor. They never had to apologize for being obnoxious when that didn’t happen
Or maybe it's not just a craze and we'll soon look back and think "I wonder what we might've done differently if we'd been clear-eyed about what was happening."
Show me a person who truly revised their priors to put forward a novel solution to AI that isn't just "do the thing that I like and that benefits me in some way". The discourse around all this is a mix of quasi-religious beliefs (pro and con) and blatant opportunism. For Dario and Sam, the solution is "give us a monopoly on this tech". For Gates, it's "create an supranational organization with unprecedented taxation and regulatory powers" - world AI police, presumably staffed by technocrats like him.<p>What's your take? Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?
<a href="https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/</a> <a href="https://ai-2040.com" rel="nofollow">https://ai-2040.com</a><p>Can you describe a method of slowing frontier AI development that you yourself would not classify as monopoly-seeking by US AI companies or power-seeking by governments and technocrats?<p>Limiting the development of powerful AI requires restricting free enterprise in some way, backed by the threat of force; hence, there will always be a cynical framing available.
Unless there's another significant breakthrough, LLMs will only get incremental improvements.
I could google this, but what are these dancing crazes?
Never let a good crisis go to waste, billg.
Love how Gates and Nadella had nothing to say until this year, after they clearly lost any hope of building a moat around it
> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots.<p>You had me here.
billg: "kaczynski was right afterall"
Dunno what's going on with these urls;<p>[dupe] Discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448137">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448137</a>
640k ought be enough for this AI. I'm not sure takes like these are helpful. It's widely acknowledged that this is a technological shift, like electricity, like industrialization, etc. It could be (good or bad) but most likely (good AND bad). Does anyone really believe, sincerely, that AI will be the great equalizer? It's a hilarious proposition. They are working their hardest to make sure that its not imo.
I've tried to type this up a couple times, each time backing out because at the end of the day, I really don't give a rats fart about anything Gates has to say. I just wish he would disappear.
dupe: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448137">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448137</a>
Is it me or does it read like pure satire?<p>An AI ministry, “human-reserved” jobs, and taxes on AI tokens.
Sandbags against a tsunami. When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?<p>What we need is deep thinking on the implications and make the default way forward one where we want to go. In other words, we build a channel for the flood waters, not a wall. Creating a role for "somebody to deal with AI issues" is one of those hand-wavvy upper management moves that looks defensible but simply passes the buck to someone who structurally lacks the agency to actual move the needle.
What surprises me even more is why Bill Gates writes this kind of bizarre, low-quality nonsense in the first place. What purpose does it serve? It’s so obviously shallow that it influences nothing and adds nothing to the conversation.
Locally, yes, like the Japanese shogunate blocking the outside world for more than two hundred years.<p>Globally, it is unrealistic.
You aren't alone surely
It reads like somebody got AI psychosis.<p>"A lot of people are skeptical of AI because it makes mistakes. But what's going to happen when it stops making mistakes??? It'll change the world!"<p>Honestly I suspect he's probably just cynically talking his book. All of this "AI is scary good / it'll be even scarier gooder soon" is no less advertising than slapping a cigarette logo on a racing car.
Taxing AI tokens will only lead to the acceleration of local LLMs, to produce tax-free tokens.<p>We must tax lines of code. Like property tax, but for code. Every year, companies (and individuals) must declare all repos. Have them appraised.
If you’re one of the people wondering why there’s an enormous backlash to AI, here’s your answer: “this thing we’re building is going to he fucking terrible and ruin your life. Please give us all your money to build it.”
I'm sorry. I absolutely do not trust Bill Gates. His history of ruthless, cutthroat tactics in the 90s is not easily forgotten and when he proposes things like international organizations to audit everyone's AI[1] I can't help but question his motives.<p>I also don't understand what gives him the moral standing to propose a solution at all. He's not the fucking pope but a ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved. He should stick to his lane.<p>[1]
> But even a country that gets its own house in order will still be exposed to risks that cross borders. This is why an international organization will need to be built in parallel.<p>> It will be unlike any other institution we have ever created, though it can follow the model of some existing systems. There’s an inspections regime for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer. A new global organization for AI will need elements of all three and more.
> ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved<p>Isn't that past-tense? What's his financial interest these days? He still owns a small amount of MSFT, but he doesn't exactly have control over the corporation any more. I imagine Nadella always answers his calls, but I'd bet most CEOs will make time to take a call from Bill.
> He's not the fucking pope<p>No, but he <i>did</i> link to the Pope in this very essay.<p>Pope Leo XIV, "On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence":<p><a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...</a>
Interesting that you chose the pope as a positive control. I'd say that taken the whole history of papacy into question, there is no particular reason to trust the pope either.
All his good things (possibly help medicine! agriculture! government!) involve a belief in ever-increasing superintelligence and so much "hope" and optimimusm and may not ever exist.<p>All his negative things (increase of fraud, skill atrophy, cyberattacks, removing employment, consolidation of capital and wealth) exist currently now with AI as it is.<p>How long will negatives outweigh the positives? And will those positives ever actually come to fruition? How anyone (who is not a sociopath and expects to be one of those pyramid tops) can see a bright future is beyond my pessimism and sense of reality as it is now.
Yes, let's put copilot in every app on Windows, Azure & Office :-)
This is the person behind such products as Windows and Copilot. I honestly don't trust a single word he says.
But Bill stopped being involved in Microsoft’s day to day business over a decade ago. And he’s making valid arguments that don’t require us to trust him. Do you not think labor disruption, cyberattacks, and mass surveillance are big risks from powerful AI?
We should not be listening to a man who drugged his wife with Epstein supplied antibiotics after getting an STD (among many, <i>many</i> other bad things he's done).<p><a href="https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/176578/20260201/epstein-files-reveal-bill-gates-caught-an-std-and-asked-for-antibiotics-to-give-wife-melinda-in-secret.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/176578/20260201/epstei...</a>
yep, lets listen to a pedophile, he will surely have words of wisdom for us. - Euroturds
"In my second one, which I started full time in 2008, I am giving back the wealth I made at Microsoft with the goal of making the world a healthier, better educated, and more equitable place."<p>Like inventing waterless toilets when people just need access to clean water ?<p>The sad story is that we don't need innovation, we need better politics.<p>Oh and he could open source windows, that would make us more equitable for sure.