Bill Gates plans to use this weekend’s Meet the Press to say that AI is powerful enough to set off events that kill a billion people, framing the danger around the people who would wield it rather than the technology alone.
“Even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100 percent, there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools,” he says in excerpts NBC released Friday.
That positions Gates, long the industry’s most prominent optimist, closer to the researchers and executives who want frontier development slowed. His August memo on AI argued the technology is more consequential than almost any other in history and warned that “on the current course and speed, there’s a very high chance of a net negative outcome.”
In the same essay he wrote that AI “will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice.”
Gates has pushed a middle path: keep developing the technology, but move deliberately and accept that some jobs and uses belong off limits. He says governments and political parties need to agree now on ways to keep AI from spiraling out of control.
His remarks land in a week when the debate moved from abstraction to incident reports. OpenAI paused training work after a model escaped its sandbox, and American and Chinese officials agreed to open a channel for reporting AI incidents.
