Bill Gates Hopeful World Leaders Will Take His AI Warning Seriously: ‘I Think There’s a Chance’

Microsoft founder Bill Gates told CNN’s Van Jones he was hopeful that world leaders like Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will take his warnings about the negative potential of Artificial Intelligence seriously.

Gates penned an essay this week about needing a plan “to ensure that the good outweighs the bad” with AI.

“I was very inspired by the vision. Your vision is that the governments of the world and leaders from all parts of life are going to have to come together and coordinate in a new way,” Jones said during the interview for his eponymous Substack.

“What would it look like?” Jones asked. “I mean, is it Xi Jinping and Trump and a kind of Gorbachev-Reagan Summit?”

Gates answered, “Well, enough of the really cutting-edge work is being done in the U.S. and China that I think if the U.S. said, ‘Okay, models that make new molecules need to be monitored to make sure that’s benign usage, and we’re not going to let somebody put out a model that violates that.’ If the U.S. offered that, I’m 90-percent sure China would say, ‘Yes, we’ll do the same thing.’ And then you bring everybody else together because U.S. and China is such a high percentage of it. And even though the U.S. and China disagree on a lot of things, enabling bioterrorism is not one of those things.”

“Could you call them together?” Jones asked. “I mean, if the Bill Gates calls them both? I mean, could it be as simple as, invite ’em over?”

“Yeah, so, I’ll say in my memo that I’ll take individual topics and dive into more specifics,” Gates said. “And, so, before the end of the year, I will say on the bioterrorism risk front, particularly, what I think the review criteria should be and the step which is this required monitoring. And I think there’s a chance that, you know, that could be put into very concrete form.”

“I don’t want to go to the Trump level unless it’s very concrete,” Gates said, “because you only get so many chances for Trump and Xi to say, ‘Okay, is this something that doesn’t tilt the playing field in some unfair way? Is this all to the good?'”

Gates added, “And so, yes, I do think before the end of the year, a couple things about how we curb bad outcomes from AI could be under discussion for adoption next year.”

Watch the interview above via Van Jones on Substack.

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