Today the Gates Foundation celebrates its 25th anniversary by announcing its plans to close up shop.
Established in 2000 — when Melinda French Gates was just 35 and Bill Gates was 44 and the world’s richest man — the foundation quickly became one of the most consequential philanthropies the world has ever seen, utterly reshaping the landscape of global public health, pouring more than $100 billion into causes starved for resources and helping save tens of millions of lives.
For all its pragmatic public-health spade work, the foundation has also served as a kind of valorous abstraction — the seeming embodiment of “the Golden Rule,” in a phrase that Bill Gates likes to use, and the face of an increasingly anachronistic era of elite optimism.
“You could say this announcement is not very timely,” Gates says, but the timeline isn’t short: He is committing the foundation to 20 more years of generous aid, more than $200 billion in total, targeting health and human development. And it comes laced with familiar humanitarian confidence, as Gates and his team now believe that their central goals can be achieved in much shorter time. But it is also disconcertingly definitive: The foundation will close its doors, permanently, on Dec. 31, 2045, at least several decades before originally intended. In the meantime, it will be spending down its endowment, as well as almost all of Gates’s remaining personal fortune.
The news comes at a time that will seem to many as a perilous one, given the Trump administration’s recent assault on foreign aid and indeed on the idea of global generosity itself. A study in The Lancet recently calculated that cuts to American spending on PEPFAR, the program to deliver H.I.V. and AIDS relief abroad, could cost the lives of 500,000 children by 2030. The journal Nature suggested that an overall cessation of U.S. aid funding could result in roughly 25 million additional deaths over 15 years.
Donald Trump is the face of these cuts, but the cruelty of his administration is not the only story. After leaping upward in the 2000s, global giving for health grew very slowly through the 2010s. The culture of philanthropy has changed somewhat, too, with the age of the Giving Pledge — in which hundreds of the world’s richest people promised to donate more than half of their great fortunes to charity — yielding first to the upstart movement called Effective Altruism and then to a new age of extreme wealth defined less by altruism than by grandiosity. After the Gateses’ divorce in 2021, Melinda eventually left the foundation to establish her own philanthropy; Warren Buffett, a longtime supporter, recently announced his plans to leave most of his remaining fortune in the hands of a charitable trust his own children will administer, and to give no additional money to the Gates Foundation beyond his death. After a few years of slow post-Covid decline, this has been the year that foreign aid — as the Gates Foundation’s chief executive, Mark Suzman, wrote recently in The Economist — “fell off a cliff.”
On the ground, progress has been bumpy, too, particularly in the aftermath of the pandemic emergency, when many routine vaccination programs were paused and the world’s poorest countries were thrown, en masse, into extreme debt distress. The share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty fell by almost three-quarters between 1990 and 2014, but it has hardly shrunk since.
To hear Gates and his team tell it, this is the time to go all in — given the yawning gaps produced by post-pandemic setbacks and the Trump assault, and given the promise of biomedical tools and other lifesaving innovations now in the development pipeline, and given A.I., a subject Gates returns to again and again. They even talk excitedly about a world in which the Gates Foundation has made itself unnecessary. That world sounds tremendously appealing. But — given the obstacles — can it be built?
Over two days in late April, I spoke with Gates about the state and legacy of his philanthropic endeavor, its achievements and disappointments thus far and what lies ahead. What follows is an edited and condensed version of those conversations, in which he was sunny, detailed and confident, sometimes to the point of brusque certainty, that the next few decades would yield even more radical improvements in global development than what he called, in retrospect, “our miraculous period.”
I. ‘Millions of Additional Deaths of Kids’
Let’s talk about the very present tense, with the Trump administration completely turning its back on foreign aid and leaving not just many millions of people but also most of the world’s global institutions in the lurch. How bad is it?
You could say this announcement is not very timely. Over the last 25 years, we achieved far more than I — or I think anyone — expected. The world invented new tools, we made them cheap, we got them out. We went from 10 million childhood deaths to five million. Over the next 20 years, can you cut that in half again? The answer is: Absolutely.
But then you have this weird thing: In the next four years — or eight years, I don’t know — the actual money going into these causes is reduced, and reduced way beyond what I would have expected. On childhood deaths, which over the next few years should have gone from five million to four million — now, unless there’s a big reversal, we’ll probably go from five million to six million.
Another million kids dying each year.
Now, that’s not to say that it’ll go back to 10 million. And in the year 2000, when it was 10 million, did people know to feel so bad? Not as much as I wish they would have.
You have to go to Africa and see a malaria ward at the height of the malaria season. Or you have to see kids who are stunted. And weirdly, the incredible success of the last 25 years is not as visible to people as it should be.
But that also means that when people cut these things, will they notice? They cut the money to Gaza Province in Mozambique. That is really for drugs, so mothers don’t give their babies H.I.V. But the people doing the cutting are so geographically illiterate, they think it’s Gaza and condoms. Will they go meet those babies who got H.I.V. because that money was cut? Probably not.
And so you say, OK, it’s going to be millions —
You mean millions of additional deaths?
Because of these cuts, millions of additional deaths of kids.
Were you surprised by the cruelty?
The reductions to U.S.A.I.D. are stunning. I thought there’d be, like, a 20 percent cut. Instead, right now, it’s like an 80 percent cut. And yes, I did not expect that. I don’t think anybody expected that. Nobody expected the executive branch to cut PEPFAR or polio money without the involvement of Congress. What’s going on with H.I.V. research and trial networks, I didn’t expect that either. We will do our best to get these things changed. I will be an advocate. But those are real headwinds.
And what’s Congress going to do? My history with Congress is that they’re very supportive. We’ve had cases during Trump’s first presidency, when he and Russ Vought at the Office of Management and Budget said, We’re going to cut PEPFAR. And Congress didn’t give it the time of day. But these are different times. And the cuts are so dramatic that even if we get some restored, we’re going to have a tough time.
I don’t think we’re going to have administration after administration who cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts these things. I see it as a four- to six-year interruption. And if we zoom out and think about 20 years from now — I do think we’ll cut childhood deaths, despite all this, because the Golden Rule was not repealed.
Are you sure? I worry about the humanitarian impulse subsiding, replaced by more mercenary self-interest.
My optimism hasn’t been shaken. You could say it’s not just the last four months. It’s certainly post-pandemic. And when did our movement reach its peak — 2008? 2015? But I don’t think it’s inherent. It’s just that some people have focused on other things. If it’s brought to them, if they get to see it, people do care about children’s deaths.
And science — thank God science doesn’t go backward as we invent these tools. It’s a permanent change: children not being malnourished or women not bleeding to death or girls not getting H.I.V. And the overarching thing here is: Will innovation in the rich world driven by A.I. help bring down some of these health costs so that the scarcity is somewhat relieved, and so that people’s basic generosity can come back to the fore?
The moral math is inarguable.
I think there’s a logic to solving tuberculosis. I mean, it’s criminal not to solve TB. It’s criminal not to solve H.I.V. It’s criminal not to eradicate malaria.
But all of those things were true before the Gates Foundation was founded, and people were doing less about it then, right?
Yeah, but the poor countries that suffer from these things didn’t have the resources or the ability to organize that R.&D. effort. It’s a huge market failure. We came along and said, Yes, we’re going to take this money and put it to this cause. And to some degree, we got some partners to join us, but I don’t see that going away.
For a long period there, the world could look to you and Melinda and the foundation as icons of a certain set of values and a model of what to do with great wealth. Then we had Effective Altruism, which was even more aggressive about leveraging each dollar for maximum humanitarian impact, though many of those figures went on to obsess over different sets of questions, like the welfare of the planet’s chickens or multiplanetary humans of the 23rd century. Now it’s like, Who’s the world’s richest man? Elon Musk. And he’s not giving much away, if anything, to the needs of the world’s poor.
Well, he’s the one who cut the U.S.A.I.D. budget. He put it in the wood chipper, because he didn’t go to a party that weekend.
Technically he’s still attached to the Giving Pledge, but I haven’t seen evidence that he’s actually committed to it.
The Giving Pledge — an unusual aspect of it that you can wait until you die and still fulfill it. So who knows? He could go on to be a great philanthropist. In the meantime, the world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children.
One thing that worries me is that this is not just happening here. The U.S. has been a very large share of global humanitarian aid, and so the Trump cuts are devastating. But there has been a rollback almost everywhere in the world.
Yes, in the U.K., their aid budget was up at 0.7 percent of G.D.P., then it went to 0.5 percent under the conservative leadership, and now — stunningly, as part of going to see President Trump — it’s gone down to 0.3 percent. Germany is proposing to cut its aid budget. France has big budget problems. So aid is getting squeezed.
What sense do you make of that? Why is this happening?
It’s not happening because people are targeting these areas and saying, We don’t care about these areas. I almost wish it was, because then we could have a head-on discussion about childhood death and the Golden Rule. But in Europe, they’ve always had a budget conundrum: In an aging society, your pension and health costs are going to go up, and your willingness to raise taxes is modest, so you’re headed toward a big problem. And then you layer on top of that new defense spending because of Ukraine. …
Take Keir Starmer. A day before he’s supposed to fly and see Trump, and he’s like, Oh, my God, I’ve got to show that we’re serious about defense spending. He’s in some meetings saying, OK, how do I increase defense spending from 2.1 percent to 2.3 percent? And somebody says, We could cut the aid budget from 0.5 percent to 0.3 percent. Nobody says, Hey, what about those kids who won’t get vaccines?
And that’s a center-left government. And it’s in the U.K., where civil society is actually stronger on these issues than anywhere else in the world. The Labour Party deserves a lot of credit for building the heyday of this movement. So that one was particularly surprising and a bit disappointing.
And you’re right that a single actor who’s like, Hey, we don’t want to give — collectively, it reduces the will of other people to give. When each country decides, OK, I’m sort of just going to take care of myself, it pushes other countries to at least think about that. So I’m sad to see defense budgets being increased, because that’s money that’s not going to human welfare either domestically or to help the poorest in the world. It’s a tragic thing.
II. ‘It’s Very Dangerous to Suggest That This Work Is Played Out’
Last year, in an annual foundation report, you wrote: “The global health boom is over. But for how long?”
Back when I was giving TED speeches warning about the next pandemic, I would have said, Well, a next pandemic would be a terrible thing, but at least people would say, Wow, these vaccines are amazing! They’d say, We need to have disease surveillance, and we need to strengthen the World Health Organization. I never would have expected that after vaccines clearly saved tens of millions of lives, the reputation of vaccines and the commitment to health surveillance would be lower than it was before the pandemic.
What sense do you make of that? In America, we tell ourselves one kind of story — about the backlash to science, on one side, or the liberal overreach, on the other. But this is not just an American phenomenon. The measles outbreak in Canada, for instance, is even bigger than ours; in Europe, they’ve gone from 127 cases in 2022 to more than 35,000 in 2024. Routine vaccination rates went down almost everywhere. What’s happening?
I don’t know. In the U.S., this pandemic, in the end, produced something like 1.4 million deaths. And that’s both a large number and a small number. And when you go to people and you say, Drop everything — well, who knows? And the risk to younger people who didn’t have uncommon medical problems was very low, particularly once you didn’t have an overloaded health system.
Is that just an American story, or is it how you see things playing out globally?
It’s not nearly as bad elsewhere. The U.S. is really acute, in terms of, I don’t want to hear about the pandemic. It certainly didn’t bring us together. And there were all kinds of mistakes and things people didn’t know.
But tragically, global health did not benefit. It was hurt by the pandemic. Government indebtedness was hurt by the pandemic, too.
This is one of the clearest stories of global development of the last few years, that the pandemic really slowed progress — in many cases, reversing it. But when I look at certain measures, I see signs that the slowdown began earlier. Extreme poverty drops by three-quarters between 1990 and 2014, and it hasn’t dropped much since. In the worst-suffering places, maternal mortality is still improving, but globally the rates have plateaued for about a decade now. Childhood deaths — according to UNICEF, the global under-5 mortality rate fell from 77 per 1,000 births in 2000 to 44 in 2015 and to only 37 in 2023. Are these just statistical illusions, or did the development miracle shift into a lower gear about a decade ago?
Well, the numbers are complicated. There’s a lot of different ways that data is gathered, and there are a lot of different ways of looking at it. But I think it’s very dangerous to suggest that this work is played out.
I’m not suggesting that at all. I’m just asking what there might be to learn from recent history. The U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals were announced in 2000, and by 2015, a majority had seen good or excellent progress. It was pretty miraculous — when the U.N. put together its scorecard, it was mostly green. But the Sustainable Development Goals were announced in 2015, and that has been a much different story. According to the U.N., only 17 percent of them are on track to reach their target by 2030. More than a third are stagnating or regressing. The last scorecard I saw — it was mostly yellow, pink and red. The overall judgment was “severely off track.”
Well, 2015 is the M.D.G. cutoff, but maternal and child deaths in Africa were still going down pretty well through 2019. The rates in Asia have continued to go down since 2019. The outlier here is Africa. And there, in the last five years, Ethiopia has had a civil war, Sudan has a civil war.
Sub-Saharan Africa is very challenged financially and with instability. Just the debts alone! And we should be doing what we did at the turn of the century, which is debt relief for all of these countries, to give them a clean balance sheet. But there isn’t the will right now.
There are now 3.3 billion people living in countries where interest payments outweigh spending on either education or health.
There will be a time, I hope, when Africa rises back up in terms of people’s priorities. And on all these metrics, you have African population growth that’s working against you. Where are the babies being born? They’re being born in Chad, not Sweden. And it’s a mistake — they should be born in Sweden. But that’s just not the way it works. Since 1950, the portion of the world’s births that are in very poor countries has gone from about 10 percent to about 25 percent. So you have this shift underneath that really affects those top-line numbers.
III. ‘I Ended Up With This Gigantic Fortune’
So why now? The Gates Foundation is celebrating its 25th anniversary. What is the value of announcing its plans to sunset at the same time?
Well, it allows us to do a lot more because we’re not trying to steward our money for some weird legacy thing. If we were trying to be a forever foundation, instead of being able to spend $9 billion a year, we’d have to drop down to spending like $6 billion a year.
I’ve heard this described as a “bolus dose” approach — the medical term for an injection that gets meds into the patient’s system rapidly.
Normally we’re saving lives for $2,000 or $3,000. But given the problems that are out there, we’re actually now saving lives for less.
And this is a miraculous time. A lot of the hundred billion we’ve spent is to build a pipeline, and the most important stuff the foundation is doing is the stuff that’s in the R.&D. pipeline right now. The tuberculosis stuff — compared with what we’ve done in the last 25 years, our TB stuff is mind-blowing. We will have a genetic cure for H.I.V., and we should spend whatever it takes to get that done, because that changes the world permanently. We’ll be able to take A.I. into our drug-discovery efforts.
The tools are so phenomenal — the way we’re going to put A.I. into the health-delivery system, for example. All the intelligence will be in the A.I., and so you will have a personal doctor that’s as good as somebody who has a full-time dedicated doctor — that’s actually better than even what rich countries have. And likewise, that’s our goal for the educational tutor. That’s our goal for the agricultural adviser. And so given that I have these resources, what can we achieve? It makes a big difference to take the money and spend it now versus later.
Were you thinking, 25 years ago, that the foundation would eventually sunset?
We said at the beginning that the philanthropy would spend all of its money within 50 years after both Melinda and I were dead.
Why was that?
The world is going to change very dramatically. Just take A.I. alone, or politics alone. The idea that I could write some set of goals that somebody would either honestly try to interpret or misinterpret 50 years from now — that’s kind of silly. And we’re not running out of rich people. There will be more rich people, and they will also see what A.I. has done and not done, and what politics and governments have done and not done.
And I do think good examples influence other people. I think the rich people today should do more philanthropy, and we have some examples of that. And I think the rich people 20 years from now should do more in philanthropy.
How different is the world of giving today compared with when the foundation was first established?
Well, first you have to say it’s unusual that one individual would have so much wealth. But Microsoft did super well, and so I ended up with this gigantic fortune, and I was in a dialogue with Melinda, even before we got married, and with Warren Buffett, studying philanthropists.
In your announcement, you cite Andrew Carnegie’s line: “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”
So what should be done with these resources? And it was in the ’90s that I studied other foundations and asked questions like, What do children die from?
At the time, I didn’t know a lot about these diseases. I hadn’t been exposed. Microsoft travel had taken me to South Africa, but I didn’t go to townships to sell software. Well, actually, I did go to Soweto to install a computer, and I was kind of surprised — Wow, the electricity doesn’t work very well here. But I was quite naïve about that part of the world. And in terms of the impact we’ve had, the partnerships we’ve built, the deep understandings that have been achieved — we’ve done extremely well.
In a way you can say: Why was that sitting there? Why, when we gave just $50 million, did we become the biggest funder of malaria work? At the time, that was killing 600,000 children. What a strange world that the incentive system doesn’t take these resources and assign them to that human thing. That’s a tragedy and a missed opportunity.
IV. ‘You Never Get to Zero’
So let’s talk about the next 20 years. In making the announcement, you’ve highlighted three major goals. First: “No mom, child or baby dies of a preventable cause.” With maternal mortality, how do we get from where we are now to zero?
Well, whenever somebody says zero, that’s an idealistic thing. You never get to zero. The U.S. is not at zero. But you can get to near-parity — where the poor-country rate and the rich-country rate is within a factor of two. That is very doable.
How?
Maternal death — it’s bleeding to death, where we have new tools that are pretty fantastic for that. That’s one of our great successes of the last five years. And now that’s being rolled out.
You have eclampsia, which actually rich countries haven’t figured out, either.
My wife went through that. Twice, actually.
And so we’re doing basic research on how do you do ultrasound to see placental development and see where in the uterus the placenta is, and how it’s developing, and how do you intervene to improve that? And do you avoid using C-sections when you shouldn’t do C-sections? And doing them at the right time, when you should do them, and doing them the right way?
Then, gestational diabetes is this unbelievable thing that not only is it bad for the baby and the mother, but the prediction of the mother’s health later on is extremely diminished. Half of those women will get full-bore diabetes within five years, and in these countries, that means they’ll die 15 to 20 years younger. So maternal mortality — it’s amazing how little goes into that, even for things like eclampsia that trouble the rich world. And in the 20-year period, we should be able to cut that in half, although that would be an acceleration. We haven’t been on a very good rate for that even during our miraculous period.
Do you see childhood mortality in the same way?
Yeah, there’s not some peak thing going on with progress on under-5 deaths. It’s true — they only went down 2.2 percent per year after going down 3.7 percent per year. But we can cut that in half again.
In your announcement, you set a goal that “the next generation grows up in a world without deadly infectious disease.”
A lot of these diseases, as you reduce the burden, you get huge community benefits. So you don’t have to protect everyone.
There are a few things like rotavirus — rotavirus is everywhere. You can’t suppress it. You just have to protect people from it. You could go into U.S. hospitals and find rotavirus.
But typhoid, cholera — you can get rid of those. The dynamics of infectious disease are very favorable, in that you can get these exponential declines.
We’re going to get rid of lymphatic filariasis in India — it’s amazing. There’s visceral leishmaniasis. With H.I.V., we now have Lenacapavir — this Gilead shot that gives a woman six months of protection. If global funding were normal, we’d be saying, OK, let’s get 95 percent of girls in South African townships to take Lena, and we would break the back of the disease transmission over a five-year period. Now, with the cuts, it’s unclear what the heck’s going to happen with that.
It’s still a lot to ask people to get shots, right?
Twice a year, and this is a painful shot.
Soon we’ll have an oral Merck drug that you just take once a month. You don’t have to make a visit. We think we can get the cost on that down to $2, so that’s even better. But in the meantime, we know that these girls are at risk.
What about with malaria? You’ve been working on it since the beginning of the foundation, really, when annual deaths were at 800,000 or 900,000.
In 2010, we were at about 600,000 deaths, and then we got down as low as about 400,000 in 2018, and now we’re back up at 600,000. That’s drug resistance and how slow it’s been to get the new dual insecticide bed nets out — we had to get the prices of those down.
And that one can go backward on you because your bed nets are always wearing out, because mosquitoes evolve and your drugs are always wearing out and the disease itself evolves. We’ve got a pipeline of new drugs. Artemisinin is our primary drug right now, but if that resistance which is in Southeast Asia spreads a lot faster, we will have compounds that completely evade that.
Our current modeling also shows that in certain places, if we could decimate the mosquito population — that literally means 90 percent reduction — then the reinfection rate is slow enough that we ought to be able to clear malaria from those areas. The Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Nigeria will be the last places in the world with malaria. But that’s not a five-year goal or even a 10-year goal. That would be a high-reach goal for our 20 years to eradicate malaria in Africa.
But the most important thing of all the things we’re doing is the malnutrition work. If you avoid kids being malnourished, you cut childhood death in half by that alone.
That brings us to the last of the three final goals: bringing hundreds of millions of additional people out of poverty and putting more countries on a path to prosperity. The S.D.G. target, officially, is to eradicate poverty. But the World Bank estimates that, at current rates, it would take more than a century to get everybody out of poverty, which means living on less than $7 a day. And the gap between the world’s rich and the world’s poor is only growing, even with the gains of the 1990s and 2000s.
Well, there’s definitely a poverty trap that when you’re poor and you have ill health, you have high population growth.
The part of poverty that we’re very focused on — we do digital money, where you have savings accounts and you can borrow money. But our biggest economic thing is our work in agriculture. In the face of climate change, population growth, you have to take Africa from being a net food importer to a net food exporter.
And there’s huge upside in African agriculture. I mean, we are by far the biggest funder of seed improvement.
But you’ve had some difficulty with uptake there, right? There’s been local pushback on AGRA, which was founded to boost agricultural productivity in Africa but hasn’t met the goals it set for itself. There has been huge resistance to G.M.O.s, which bring in genetic material from other organisms, and “magic seeds,” which use gene editing to alter the existing material.
Yeah. For a while we were trying to say, Hey, be open-minded to G.M.O.s. What we’ve succeeded at, and it’s fantastic for the world, is that gene editing is broadly accepted. And so you’re going to see Green Revolution-type seed-productivity improvements and disease resistance because of the broad acceptance of gene-edited seeds. It’s a fantastic thing.
And we can clearly double the agricultural productivity in Africa. They’re currently at a third of the agricultural productivity of Europe and the United States. Now, you can’t just wave your hand at that, because — why is it? They have worse soils. The crops that they grow are unique to their ecosystems. In sub-Saharan Africa, they don’t have money to buy fertilizer. But doubling African agricultural productivity should be pretty straightforward. If you’re in the Central African Republic or parts of the D.R.C., maybe not, that’s very tough.
But for Africa as a whole, it’s very achievable. It’s not an easy place to make things work, but I do think in the next 20 years, we’ll see Africa get, on both health and G.D.P., on a much better track.
V. ‘You Can Accuse Me of Being by Nature an Optimistic Person’
We’ve been talking a lot about R.&D. and drug development, but I wanted to ask you about the gap between what works in a lab and what is needed on the ground — and whether we risk overlooking some of those old-school public-health needs in our excitement about the cutting-edge stuff in the pipeline. Bed nets are, for many, a kind of representative example: You have done some innovation on bed nets, but they’re still just bed nets. And yet they’ve saved an awful lot of lives.
Well, there are questions like, Can you even do an H.I.V. vaccine? These are tough scientific problems. Then there are things like, when a rotavirus vaccine is developed for rich countries, once the formulation passes these trials, even if it’s very expensive to make, we have to take the innovation of the Western vaccine manufacturers and couple that with the cost orientation of what are called the developing-country vaccine manufacturers.
So my answer to you is that it’s on a spectrum. On the one hand, there’s the stuff that’s: Wow, that’s scientifically impressive. Understanding malnutrition — that is scientifically very impressive. The microbiome and this thing called B. infantis, which is a good part of the microbiome — that is really amazing stuff. So we do some things that are very hard science. But everything we do is motivated by the outcomes.
Speaking of outcomes, you’ve mentioned A.I. several times —
I wish I didn’t have to rely on that magic wand, but I guarantee you that it is real. I’m not making that up.
But it’s also true that in order to be absolutely sure that the next 20 years will be incredible, I have to rely somewhat on the foundation’s ability to find partners in poor countries who can bring A.I. advances into their health systems, agriculture systems and education systems at least a decade sooner than would happen without us pushing that.
I have a lot of faith in A.I. powering biomedical advances, too. But outside the lab, the delivery side of things seems trickier. Some of these vaccines, we had the technology for a long time before they really reached the people who needed them the most. Or some of the seed technology — you’ve often run into difficulty with uptake. How does A.I. help there?
Well, one demo you should see is that, as the A.I.s train on all the local dialects, you take somebody in a remote area of Africa who just has a feature phone — not a smartphone, but enough network connectivity that voice calls work — and they dial this number, which is for agricultural farm advice, and they talk about: What should I plant? What are the prices? This is the case where the A.I. meets them where they are, because it learns their local dialect and it speaks their local dialect and it connects over that existing infrastructure.
It just somewhat puts me in mind of that old line of yours about malaria and the internet balloons.
What line about internet balloons?
Oh, I think it was 2013, when Google was rolling out a program to deliver the internet via balloons to the developing world. Was it called Project Loon? And you suggested they were sort of too focused on the technology and not enough in terms of the real problems demanding attention on the ground: “When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you,” you said. “When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that.”
Well, the way to think of A.I. is that it’s essentially free intelligence, and in no sense does that mean it will naturally be made available to people in poor countries. It helps rich people — that’s where the market will take it. And that’s why having a big nonmarket actor like us who’s sophisticated about A.I. is so important. It’s incredible what we will be able to do.
And so you can accuse me of being by nature an optimistic person. But I just think I’m being realistic. I think it’s objective to say to you that things will be better in the next 20 years.
In any case, let’s say somebody convinced me otherwise. What am I going to do? Just go buy a bunch of boats or something? Go gamble? This money should go back to society in the way that it has the best chance of causing something positive to happen.
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