"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."

"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.”"

"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."

"Then of course, the internet takes that to a whole new level."

"It’s pretty stunning that what I'm seeing in AI just in the last 12 months is every bit as important as the PC, the PC with GUI [graphical user interface], or the internet. As the four most important milestones in digital technology, this ranks up there."

"But what's surprising is that tasks that involve reading and writing fluency — like summarizing a complex set of documents or writing something in the style of a pre-existing author — the fact that you can do that with these large language models, and reinforce them, that fluency is really quite amazing."

"If you take this progression, the ability to help you write and to help you read is happening now, and it will just get better. And they're not hitting a boundary, nor are their competitors."

"But the near-term issue with AI is a productivity issue. It will make things more productive and that affects the job market."

"The long term-issue, which is not yet upon us, is what people worry about: the control issue. What if the humans who are controlling it take it in the wrong direction? If humans lose control, what does that mean? I believe those are valid debates."