Bill Gates has announced that the Gates Foundation will spend at least $1 billion over the next two years to widen access to AI, warning that without intervention, Artifical intelligence could deepen global inequality rather than ease it.
Bloomberg reports that Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and leftist billionaire, laid out the pledge in a report that frames the coming months as decisive for how AI reshapes the world. “AI, if shaped well, could expand who has access to solutions, opportunities, and knowledge that has too often been out of reach,” Gates wrote.
Gates says the money will fund AI tools built for education, healthcare and agriculture. Part of the pledge will also go toward folding non-English language sources into the large datasets that power AI systems, an effort meant to help developers building tools outside of English-speaking markets.
Gates framed the timing as urgent. “The decisions made in the next 12 to 18 months, about how AI is built, funded, and deployed, will determine whether this technology primarily benefits the people who already have the most or reaches those who have the least,” he wrote. Elsewhere in the report he put it more bluntly: “AI could be a great equalizer, or widen the gap.” The choice, he added, is immediate rather than theoretical: “This is not a long-range prediction. It’s a present-tense choice.”
The report picks up themes Gates raised in an August essay, where he urged tech companies and regulators to confront the risks AI poses to humanity, a considerable U-turn for the tech evangelist. Tech entrepreneurs Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have issued similar warnings recently, leading to critics accusing the industry of a choreographed move to protect their business models.
Breitbart News previously reported on Gates’ warning:
Bill Gates, who transformed himself from a software tycoon into a leftist icon of environmentalism and health philanthropy, has now published an essay calling for an AI slowdown. This is a massive shift is a shift for a tech evangelist who has built his post-Microsoft career on faith in AI’s ability to fix hard problems. Gates said this is the first time in his life he wishes a new technology would advance more slowly.
“I’m surprised to feel this way,” Gates said. “I’ve never seen a problem that innovation can’t solve.”
Gates grouped his worries into three categories: safety threats such as AI-enabled hacking, biological weapons and fraud; job losses driven by AI and AI-powered robots; and risks to children, including stunted learning and damaged human relationships. Writing software code and enabling new kinds of cyberattacks are the two areas where he says AI has recently outpaced his own expectations. Asked about the latter, he used one word: “mind-blowing.”
Gates also acknowledged a tension in his own priorities: wider AI use will push up greenhouse gas emissions, even though he wrote last year that he rejects the “doomsday view of climate change.”
Major players are jockeying for position in the AI race, including attempts to control potential government regulation of the technology. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Hall predicted the current tone of the AI debate in February, when he laid out the left’s plan to weaponize AI concerns before the midterms as a three part plan:
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Convince Americans that mass AI job loss is inevitable.
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Channel that fear and ennui into galvanizing support for Universal Basic Income (UBI) redistribution in the long-term.
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Co-opt populist concerns over AI data centers driving up electricity and water bills for everyday Americans in the short-term.
Read more at Bloomberg here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.