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Today, I’m talking to Bill Gates, cofounder and former CEO of Microsoft and chairman of the Gates Foundation. You may have noticed Bill in the news more lately — he’s been on something of a tour for the past few months, ever since publishing an essay in late August titled “The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.” In his piece, Gates ratcheted up his rhetoric around AI safety, writing that “even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history.” In interviews since, Gates has called AI “the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near,” and that AI “makes nuclear weapons look like nothing.” It is clear he does not think the current policy response from the White House, or the lack of coordinated efforts from the AI industry itself, is sufficient to combat this threat. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. So I wanted to know: Is Bill Gates an AI doomer? I also had a series of questions downstream from what he’s been arguing about AI. How can we ever hope to control AI, and align it to humanity, if we can’t even agree on what it is and whether it’s conscious? How would you even technically construct a solution to alignment that could be enforced, not just for closed-source models but open-source ones, too? Bill gave us a big chunk of his time to dig into these issues with him, and the resulting conversation is a really illuminating one. He thinks we need to prepare for roughly two decades of AI disruption, and he says this period could be so painful it might split society in two — between people comfortable living near the technological frontier, and those who reject it. We also talked about the labor considerations, the nihilism of younger generations toward technological progress, and what should make us hopeful about the future. This is a deep one. Okay: Bill Gates, the cofounder and former CEO of Microsoft. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Bill Gates, you are the co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft. You’re also the chairman of the Gates Foundation. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you. It’s good to talk to you again. You and I have spoken many times over the years. I would say that the circumstances of this conversation feel very different. Previously, when you and I would talk, you were always very hopeful about technology and what it could bring. You had a Netflix series a few years ago. You talked to The Verge, and I want to just read you this quote. You said, “I believe AI is a beneficial thing, we just need to shape it in the right way.” I would say you still agree with that, you just think the time to shape it is now. Yeah, I agree with that. I’d say the response broadly hasn’t been adequate to the speed that the challenge is arising. I’m very concerned that the bad stuff will not be minimized and that a lot of good stuff could come fairly slowly if we don’t manage it the right way. I’m very concerned that the bad stuff will not be minimized and that a lot of good stuff could come fairly slowly if we don’t manage it the right way I want to have this conversation with you in three parts. I want to understand how you feel about AI as a technology today and why it’s advancing so quickly. I’m very curious about the technology, and the technical solutions to potentially control it. There are policy solutions as well, but it seems like we have to build an awful lot of technology. I’m also very curious to talk about who might impose those solutions and controls, because that seems very much up for debate right now as well. So let’s just start at the start. What has made you feel the urgency that AI is arriving at a speed that means we’re not ready to control it? The progress over the last year has been really quite amazing, starting with the ability to write code and find cyber flaws, the ability to reason in biology, the ability to form relationships with kids or other people, the ability to disrupt the job market. The incredible power that exists today means that every one of those things will happen and society needs to be ready. Do you see that happening as a technology as a whole or in the products that are instantiated by the companies that are making AI today? What I mean is that AI is a broad set of models that exist in the world, some open source, some proprietary. Then there are the companies that make these products and there are the leaders of those companies that make these products. At every level, there’s a different relationship you or I might have to AI. Are you seeing these risks and these capabilities broadly in the field, or in the particular companies led by the particular people? The risk isn’t one model versus another model. Certainly, the near-term danger of models where you can remove all the safeguards is very high and quite different from models where you monitor to make sure that cyberattackers and bioterrorists are not able to exploit the capability of the model to do gigantic harm. The big near-term risk really comes from models without safeguards. On a longer timeframe, the control issue relates to any state-of-the-art model, but it’s always easier when you can make sure safeguards are maintained. The reason I’m asking that question that way is maybe you don’t trust Sam Altman today, but you trust Dario Amodei. Or maybe you don’t trust either one of those and you trust Satya Nadella at Microsoft, and that is a market dynamic where maybe we’re all going to pick the safest model or the safest company, and you think that is diffuse. You think eventually the technology will just get to a place where it’s harmful or can cause these harms because it exists? For somebody doing a cyberattack with the model, it’s not about choosing a model. It doesn’t matter what model you choose. If Anthropic has safeguards in place, maybe it can’t. This is their approach currently. I’m just pushing on that. Yes, certainly the models where they make sure the safeguards are not removed and they’re putting a lot of effort in seeing how those models are being used, monitoring the activity, the near-term risk from those models is not gigantic. It’s more where somebody can remove all the safeguards where the cyberattacks are available today. When you say cyberattacks, is it the things like the Hugging Face breach and the other cybersecurity incidents we’ve seen out of the labs that have made you feel that thresholds have been crossed, and you need to speak up more about the controls that are needed? It’s the basic power of the models towards everything: social relationships, the job market, cyberattacks, bioterrorism attacks. We’ve crossed the threshold of capability that this is by far the most dangerous technology ever invented, and it’ll have pervasive effects in the economy and how war is fought. The industry is actually speaking up about that quite a bit, but the awareness or even the willingness to believe these things about, “This time is different,” once you get outside the industry, it’s very, very low. People are often looking at the past and saying, “All the fears about technology in terms of its disruption, including to the job market, never were borne out. So this must be another example just like those. These people who are warning of all these different problems must just be wrong and we can ignore them.” Some outsiders say, “Get better PR companies.” But that ignores the fact that these warnings are the truth We see this with our audience as well, right? “We can’t release the model, it’s too dangerous.” “This is just hype to prop up the bubble.” And on and on we go. Yeah. None of the warnings being made about these models by industry insiders are at all insincere. They’re absolutely the truth and it’s pretty much universal. You can even go back to the founding story of OpenAI designed to say, “If we get too powerful, maybe we can not open Pandora’s box,” or to DeepMind’s negotiation with Google management. The people close to this are very concerned about misuse, job impacts, social relationship impacts, and I’d say it’s impressive to have an industry that’s speaking out as vividly as they are. Some outsiders say, “Get better PR companies.” But that ignores the fact that these warnings are the truth. You’ve obviously moved back and forth in your life between commercializing software and technology and being a humanitarian. There’s something about these companies in particular where they all started with very high-minded ideals — all three of them, Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind — to build AGI. They all built some sort of corporate governance structure to avoid the pitfalls of commercialization and unchecked capitalism, and then they started selling to enterprise clients and they seem to have gotten away from those ideals very quickly. Do you think it’s just the market? No, that’s not fair. You don’t think so? No. OpenAI reconstructed itself. No, no. The construct that was created wasn’t useful in the case where you have lots and lots of companies at the frontier. The OpenAI structure, which is, “We may choose never to productize this and to ignore the capitalistic incentives,” only works if there’s one company. That’s where it’s broken down, not because of any change of people’s awareness of the risk and how it’ll utterly change humanity. This is the other dynamic that I hear from our audience, and I hear from the AI industry itself: “We would like to stop, but the demands of competition prevent us from unilaterally stopping one company. We need some regulatory effort to stop us.” I haven’t heard anyone say they want to stop. “Pause.” That’s Dario Amodei’s wording. I’ve heard people talk about pacing the frontier or making sure that models get reviewed by governments. We usually think of governments as playing this key role in safety. In fact, for things that are not a millionth as dangerous as AI — car crashes, plane crashes — we rely on the government to establish strong technical standards, to review problems. Once you have multiple competitors, the level of responsibility can’t be with the companies. It’s completely obvious. The responsibility becomes the government’s responsibility, just like it is with every other dangerous product, although the magnitude there and the degree of change is minuscule by comparison. I will tell you I’m a little concerned about the government’s ability to understand the technology that we would hope they regulate. I’ve had a number of politicians on Decoder lately. I don’t have high hopes there. But I’m curious about your understanding of it because it feels to me like trying to regulate something or put standards against a number of companies requires you to really understand the nature of the technology that you seek to regulate. Not really. I’ll just tell you, at The Verge, we’ve asked Anthropic if they think Claude is alive. And the answer is not no. The answer is, “It might be conscious.” If you talk to people at OpenAI, they will happily tell you AGI is here. They announced it around when they announced Dots. Greg Brockman just said, “We think this is AGI. Have a good time, everyone.” Demis Hassabis said, “We stand at the foothills of the singularity.” There’s some feeling about this technology that makes it different because it might be able to take actions by itself. It might be able to have recursive self-improvement. Sure. But the definition of AGI is not important for these safety issues. The issue is, have you created a tool that could shut down banks or electricity grids? There is a business model for cyberattacks. The word “consciousness” doesn’t enter into that. The word “AGI” does not enter into that at all. We are faced with a huge safety problem, a [truncated for AI cost control]