Bill Gates: AI is a threat to Google, and will also "reshuffle" Amazon, Microsoft and Apple's markets
Michael Loccisano

Nicolai Tangen is CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the largest investment fund in the world. He interviews CEOs for his podcast, In Good Company. His most recent interview was published yesterday. It was with Bill Gates, who said the following (with minor edits for clarity) about AI:
"I'm quite impressed that these AI technologies are showing an ability to read and write. Heretofore, a computer could regurgitate the text of a book, but if you gave it a test, did it really understand the information? It wouldn't be good. What we're starting to see with these large language models including ChatGPT, is some ability to read and write. There's a lot of work to be done to make them increasingly more accurate, more customized. But it's a pretty profound advance that will be a tool in many, many professions to make people more efficient. If you have the ability to help white collar workers by looking through complex documents, whether it's contracts, a lawsuit, a drug application, the implications for productivity are pretty significant."
"One of the early applications is that when you do a search, instead of just getting a bunch of links, you'll be able to have a dialog. You'll be able to say: "I'm taking my family to Greece. Here's how old my kids are, and here's how much I can spend", and you'll be going back and forth and refining, so it will be like talking to a person who is very knowledgeable. So certainly in the search space, it's a far better experience than anything that we've had to date."
"Technology always has a downside. It's pretty rare that you have something new that doesn't have downside. Just the disruption -- what does that mean for job training? You have people worried about essays that kids write -- they'll be able to cheat and have the computer do it for them. And it's great that people are debating these issues. I think overall the benefit will be net positive, but I do not pretend that there's not a lot of care that we're going to have to exercise, particularly in areas like health where we have a labor shortage even in rich countries. So it could make doctors more effective by helping them with their paperwork, helping them find different things, help them track what's going on with their patients, that could be good. But, just as with the driving applications, the accuracy is going to have to be super high. And we don't have that yet."
"AI is the one I've been thinking about my whole life. and wondering how hard it is, and how we are going to get this. Until the last year or so, I'd say it was going a little slower than I expected. But now, it's actually surprised me that we have this acceleration. AI will be the biggest thing in this decade, I would say."
"I'm not sure there will be a winner. Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has owned all of the search profits, so the search profits will be down. and their share of it may be down because Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has been able to move fairly fast on that one."
"Eventually we'll create a personal agent that understands all your communication and understands what you're reading that can help you and give advice to you. In a sense, the personal agent will replace going directly to Amazon or going directly to Siri or going to Outlook. Google owns search, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) owns shopping, Microsoft (MSFT) owns productivity, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) owns everything on an Apple device. But once you get this personal agent, that collapses those separate markets into a "Hey, I only want one personal agent, and of course it can help me shop and plan and write documents and work across my devices in this rich way". A decade from now, we won't think of those businesses as quite separate, because the AI will know you so well that when you're buying gifts or planning trips, it won't care if Amazon has the best price or if someone else has a better price. You won't even need to think about it. So it's a pretty dramatic potential reshuffling of how tech markets look."