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Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said at a recent event that he believes whichever company comes out on top in artificial intelligence race will probably put Amazon and Google Search out of business.
Of course, this is the same guy who also said in March that artificial intelligence could “run out of control” and decide “humans are a threat,” so his messages are a bit mixed.
Speaking at a Goldman Sachs and SV Angel event on the topic of artificial intelligence in San Francisco, Gates said, “Whoever wins the personal agent, that’s the big thing, because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you’ll never go to Amazon again.”
He believes that this AI assistant will understand their person’s needs and habits and will, for example, “read the stuff you don’t have time to read.”
He also added that he thinks the winner of the AI race will either be a startup or a tech giant like, say… Microsoft.
“I’d be disappointed if Microsoft didn’t come in there,” Gates said. “But I’m impressed with a couple of startups, including Inflection.”
Bill Gates also warned that in the future humanoid robots could take over blue-collar jobs because they will be cheaper than human employees. (More free time for Tom Hanks movies!)
“As we invent these robots, we just need to make sure they don’t get Alzheimer’s,” Gates joked.
Inflection.AI was co-founded by former DeepMind executive Mustafa Suleyma and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Then again, researchers at Google Deepmind and the University of Oxford said in 2022 that AI will “likely” eliminate humanity. So the world is going to really need those cheap humanoid robots to fulfill all of those jobs that we humans used to perform.
If they don’t cause a nuclear-level catastrophe between now and then, of course.