The advancements in artificial intelligence, generative AI in particular, have had a major impact on the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Former Microsoft (MSFT) President and CEO Bill Gates joins Yahoo Finance's Julie Hyman and Brian Sozzi from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to discuss innovations in AI and its impact on the industry.

Generative AI applications (00:00:00)

"Most of the applications are just helping you be more productive. When I sit down to write something, often getting hints from the AI, having it look things over, simplify things, I found it's a real productivity increase," Gates explained. "Likewise, for coders, you're seeing 40, 50% productivity improvement, which means you can get programs sooner. You can make them higher quality, make them better."

Governance around AI (00:00:53)

"The idea that there's a lot of talk, getting government people to understand AI, could it be something where it's almost too addictive to sit there and, and talk to it. What should the guidelines be," Gates said. "I think about social media, if there is a parallel in recent years, and it feels like there was a retroactive attempt to regulate social media that wasn't quite successful. And there was perhaps some harm from social media. Do you think that there's applicable lessons to AI from that?"

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Impact on 2024 election (00:03:07)

"I'm not sure for this year it's going to be that big of a thing. I mean, you want things that are generated by computers to be labeled that way. And people are talking about news organizations," Gates said. "When you have text, you say, okay, where did you get that information from? But I don't think it'll be a huge impact."

It's all part of Yahoo Finance's exclusive coverage from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where our team will speak to top decision-makers as well as preeminent leaders in business, finance, and politics about the world’s most pressing issues and priorities for the coming year.

Editor's note: This article was written by Zach Faulds.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: Are you concerned about the pace that AI is moving in terms of innovation?

BILL GATES: There's a lot of things in terms of making it cheaper, faster, more accurate. You know, most of the applications are just helping you be more productive. You know, when I sit down to write something, often getting hints from the AI, you know, having it look things over, simplify things, you know, I've found it's a real productivity increase.

Likewise for coders, you're seeing 40%, 50% productivity improvement, which means you can get programs sooner, you can make them higher quality, make them better. So mostly what we'll see is that the productivity of white collar will go up.