Bill Gates has good feelings about artificial intelligence

Bill Gates has spent billions to fund technologies he believes will shape the future, from combat climate change Down eradication of disease.

The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity..

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

Well, honestly, not for practice purposes, although that was a good example where it gave a pretty good answer.

You know, I often learn about topics and ChatGPT is a great way to get clarification on specific questions. I often write things down and it’s a huge support with writing. I would say the feature I employ the most is the meeting summary, which is integrated with [Microsoft] Teams, which I employ a lot. The ability to interact and not only get a summary but also ask questions about the meeting is pretty fantastic.

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

I’m an advisor to Microsoft. It strengthens the OpenAI relationship, it’s doing a lot of its own stuff. I mean, the amount of investment from Microsoft and others in this area, it’s challenging to overstate.

Well, the short-term problems are more positive uses for it in areas like health and education. Even in the United States we have shortages. The idea of ​​a personal tutor who in Newark see Khanmigo [Khan Academy’s AI tool]which is based on ChatGPT. Seeing how great it is to support teachers do their job, to support students who are behind or ahead of us stay engaged. So over the next decade we will experience increased productivity in many areas, which is overwhelmingly good news.

As it becomes more powerful, and you know, when bad people employ it, there will be problems. But overall, I think it’s a beneficial thing and we just have to shape it in the right way.

Disinformation is something that researchers are also concerned on AI supercharging. Have you ever wondered how you would feel if the generative AI tools Microsoft was working on had a significant impact on disinformation, on things like climate change and global health?

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

AI Training uses a lot of energyHow can this be reconciled with the ambitions to combat climate change, especially since Microsoft’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising?

Microsoft and other tech companies are very much involved in finding tidy energy sources, so they will be pioneering customers, even for things like geothermal, fission, or fusion, to support launch this green energy generation. The actual growth from AI data centers, even at the extreme end, would be far below 10 percent.

So, the net benefit that we get from the support of AI in our scientific discoveries, okay, how to do it steel? How do you make meat? What will the weather be like? The benefits of AI outweigh the fact that it’s just another electrical burden, but not as much as electric cars or electric heat pumps or switching the industrial economy to use electricity instead of the direct employ of hydrocarbons.

You have funded technologies that some activists call “false solutions“to climate change because carbon capture does not remove fossil fuels or the other pollutants they cause. And nuclear power ignites the fight for uranium mining near indigenous communities. How do you deal with these concerns about climate technology?

I’m a gigantic believer that nuclear energy can support us solve the climate problem, which is very, very vital. There are projects that, in terms of safety, fuel employ, or waste management, I think minimize those problems.

It could become — although it’s not today — very affordable electricity, using fission or fusion. So we have to make sure that we’re picky about how we mine, how we store waste. But we need these technologies.

You will need weather-independent sources that can be located near where there is electricity demand to complement the radical expansion of renewable energy sources.

Fission, we can do it cheaply. TerraPower is a company that’s trying to show that we can do 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 actually skeptical because it’s never been done. But they’ll see us building this plant, and if so, that could contribute.