Exclusive: Bill Gates On Advising OpenAI,
Microsoft And Why AI Is ‘The Hottest Topic Of 2023’

In 2020, Bill Gates left the board of directors of Microsoft, the tech giant he cofounded in 1975. But he still spends about 10% of his time at its Redmond, Washington headquarters, meeting with product teams, he says. A big topic of discussion for those sessions: artificial intelligence, and the ways AI can change how we work — and how we use Microsoft software products to do it.

In the summer of 2022, Gates met with OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman to review some of the generative AI products coming out of the startup unicorn, which recently announced a “multiyear, multibillion” dollar deepened partnership with Microsoft.
You can read more about OpenAI and the race to bring AI to work — including comments from Brockman, CEO Sam Altman and many other players — in our print feature here. Gates’ thoughts on AI, shared exclusively with Forbes, are below.

This interview has been edited for clarity and consistency Alex Konrad: It looks like 2018 was the earliest I saw you talking with excitement about what OpenAI was doing. Is that right, or where does your interest in the company begin?

Bill Gates: [My] interest in AI goes back to my very earliest days of learning about software. The idea of computers seeing, hearing and writing is the longterm quest of the entire industry. It's always been super interesting to me. And so as these machine learning techniques started to work extremely well, particularly things for speech and image recognition I’ve been fascinated by how many more inventions we would need before [AI] is really intelligent, in the sense of passing tests and being able to write fluently.



I know Sam Altman well. And I got to know Greg [Brockman] through OpenAI and some of the other people there, like Ilya [Sutskever, Brockman’s cofounder and chief scientist]. And I was saying to them, “Hey, you know, I think it doesn't reach an upper bound unless we more explicitly have a knowledge representation, and explicit forms of symbolic logic.” There have been a lot of people raising those questions, not just me. But they were able to convince me that there was significant emergent behavior as you scaled up these large language models, and they did some really innovative stuff with reinforcement learning on top of it. I've stayed in touch with them, and they've been great about demoing their stuff. And now over time, they're doing some collaboration, particularly with the huge back-ends that these skills require, that's really come through their partnership with Microsoft.

That must be gratifying for you personally, that your legacy is helping their legacy.

Yeah, it's great for me because I love these types of things. Also, wearing my foundation hat [The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which Gates talked more about in September], the idea that a math tutor that’s available to inner city students, or medical advice that’s available to people in Africa who during their life, generally wouldn’t ever get to see a doctor, that’s pretty fantastic. You know, we don't have white collar worker capacity available for lots of worthy causes. I have to say, really in the last year, the progress [in AI] has gotten me quite excited.