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AI China Microsoft Technology

Bill Gates Says Open Research Beats Erecting Borders in AI (bloomberg.com) 57

Posted by msmash from the words-of-wisdom dept.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates spoke out against protectionism in technological research around topics like artificial intelligence, arguing that open systems will inevitably win out over closed ones. From a report: In conversation with Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait at the New Economy Forum in Beijing on Thursday, Gates was skeptical about the idea that ongoing U.S.-China trade tensions could ever lead to a bifurcated system of two internets and two mutually exclusive strands of tech research and development. "It just doesn't work that way," said the software pioneer. "AI is very hard to put back in the bottle," Gates said, and "whoever has an open system will get massively ahead" by virtue of being able to integrate more insights from more sources. Citing Microsoft's AI research in Beijing, Gates pondered the rhetorical question of whether it was producing Chinese AI or American AI. In the case of Microsoft's U.K. research campus in Cambridge and the findings it produces, he said that "almost every one of those papers is going to have some Chinese names on it, some European names on it and some Americans' names on it."
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Bill Gates Says Open Research Beats Erecting Borders in AI More

Bill Gates Says Open Research Beats Erecting Borders in AI

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  • Flaw in the premise (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Empiric ( 675968 ) on Thursday November 21, 2019 @11:51AM (#59439456)

    The AI that determines optimal ways to continued peaceful economic growth over time, will lose to the AI that determines the quickest and most thorough means to destroy the first AI.

    And, ultimately, to whatever degree an AI could calculate the "how", it will be the governments and economic elites that will be directing the "what".

    • House-cats have survived better than tigers because house-cats amuse humans, and tigers scare humans. Until AI exceeds the intelligence of humans, the AI that pleases its human masters will fare best. Thus, it is the morality of the humans we should be worrying about.

  • He spent literally decades attacking Free and Open computing models, now he wants to be their champion, with absolutely no sense of irony. What scum.

    • It seems to be working with Windows.

      • It seems to be working with Windows.

        You mean the closed-source operating system? The one that's one of the worst pieces of spyware in history, and even turning off all the logging options doesn't actually disable them? The one where the vendor's application software has regularly used secret API calls, where the public API calls are literally (delay; secret API call;)?

    • Or maybe years of fighting it has taught him a lesson. People can change their minds you know.

      • First he'd have to have a mind to change. I doubt his mind goes far beyond "how/what can I control next?"

      • In AI research, Microsoft is well behind Google, Alibaba, Baidu, and Tesla.

        So they benefit from openness.

        If they ever take the lead, their interest in sharing will fade.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

        I think maybe he knew that lesson all along. Windows was built on mostly open standards - C, Basic and a POSIX'y clone OS. He understood the value of building on other people's work. He also understood the Monopolist's trick of tweaking standards and, once he had enough market power to accomplish it, forcing new, closed standards on the world and profiting immensely.

        But his monopolist moment passed, and (credit where it's due) he's smart enough to have realized that there's more to life than a "richest m

        • But his monopolist moment passed, and (credit where it's due) he's smart enough to have realized that there's more to life than a "richest man in the world" pissing contest.

          Gates is worth more than ever before, because he's used his Foundation to generate personal profit.

  • Too rich to work... (Score:4, Informative)

    by The New Guy 2.0 ( 3497907 ) on Thursday November 21, 2019 @12:04PM (#59439524)

    Remember, Gates owns a lot of MSFT, but he doesn't work there anymore like he used to. He and Linus are friends now.

    • After using Linux as my daily driver for 10 years, I have to say that Linus has greatly let me down. Since I've learned more about the kernel, I've grown more to acknowledge its failures than appreciate its successes.

      • Linus actually lost a lot of interesting in the Linux Kernel project after the late 90s. Post 2000 his ambitions changes with Linux and Technology as a whole.
        • Linus until recently was the sole person responsible for approving changes to the kernel. So he may not have been programming as much, but he was still reading and critiquing a lot of source code submitted for the kernel.

      • After using Linux as my daily driver for 10 years, I have to say that Linus has greatly let me down. Since I've learned more about the kernel, I've grown more to acknowledge its failures than appreciate its successes.

        Well, let's compare it to the Windows kernel. Oh wait, you can't, it's closed source.

    • It's interesting that Linus really doesn't have near as much active participation in the Linux kernel development as he used to according to him.

      Resources: https://www.zdnet.com/article/... [zdnet.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      M$ had a history of loving open research and then wham, slamming the research behind a M$ patent and then throwing hordes of lawyers at anyone who challenged it. Yeah fuck of Wee Willie Gates the Turd, the lies are just getting lame in the desperate attempt to rebuild a corruption reputation. Hell M$ even tried to corrupt international standards to make their proprietary software and it's patents compulsory. Yeah, research open to theft and then patenting, M$ love it and have done it lots of times.

  • Open Internet (Score:3)

    by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Thursday November 21, 2019 @12:20PM (#59439604)
    Ya! Like the way an "open internet" won out over corporate greed and political corruption... Just ask ajit pai, he'll tell you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Well the internet we have now is a hell of a lot more open than it might have been, or even how it started. Remember it was a military/academic network at first and doing anything with it was expensive.

      Open AI is a good thing for freedom too. Ordinary people should have access to the same AI as corporations and governments.

      • During the internet's ARPANET Phase it truly was more closed off. It wasn't until the Late 80s is when the Internet took off and started to become it's own platform landscape. 1993 came around and just opened the flood gates to everyone by then.

      • Had the likes of compuserve or MSN had their way, we'd have a series of walled gardens without a wider internet at all (at least from the POV of the average user).

        Of course having an open internet that isn't dictated by corporations trying to sell us shit (or sell our eyeballs) is an anomaly and will soon be corrected.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        "Open AI is a good thing for freedom too."
        The internet did not make Communist China any more free.
        They took the internet and added Communist censorship and have total gov/mil control.
        Re "Ordinary people should have access to"
        The Communist experts will have a list of what "Ordinary people" can do with any tech...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Didn't it? Despite the firewall the internet gives Chinese people access to more information, and let's the rest of the world see more of what is happening in China.

          They try hard to stop the spread of news they don't like, but it still happens.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by AHuxley ( 892839 )
            Re "Despite the firewall the internet gives Chinese people access to more information"...
            Until the Communist gov finds out... and tracks the person using the internet in the wrong way down.
            Thats not "good for freedom". Just total control by a Communist nation.
            Re "the rest of the world see more of what is happening in China"
            The only information let out of China is what the Communist party allows to be seen.
            Internet use is tracked, so is any contact with any foreigners.
            No freedom in person. No freedom
    • I take it you're too young to remember CompuServe, AOL, and GEnie. They were commercial dial-up bulletin board systems, where the company set up content and forums, and users (who paid a subscription fee) dialed in with a modem to access them and interact with each other. MSN (original MSNBC, a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC) was Microsoft's foray into this subscription networking model. This was the standard for "computer networking" in the 1980s and early 1990s, aside from a bunch of bulletin

      • Gates stubbornly fought this til the bitter end, and refused to add a TCP/IP stack (necessary for a computer to communicate with the Internet) to Windows until Win 95.

        Microsoft did produce a TCP stack for Windows 3.1, they just didn't ship it with Windows. They didn't even charge for it. However, they didn't bring it out until 1995, either :)

  • He's clearly changed from the 1990s tech monster he once was. He wants something that's,*gasp* open!

    It's like the world is upside down!

    • According to Billy Gates (and many others) Windows is "open" software ... They say and believe this with a straight face, and they are not referring to its security posture.

    • He's clearly changed from the 1990s tech monster he once was. He wants something that's,*gasp* open!

      Talk is cheap. You judge people by their actions. Gates has used his "charitable" foundation to enrich himself by guiding its investments and its actions, and it's trivial to find citations regarding how it has done and is still doing evil.

  • Ironic considering why we know the guy's name. He didn't make billions by backing open source.

  • I drifted through the comments saying that he is a glaring example of closed thinking and closed systems. But... he did ultimately lose utterly to open systems. Windows and Microsoft will never be significant again. Maybe... (I totally doubt it but .. maybe) he recognizes how wrong he was for most of his life. OR... maybe he is just doing the hip virtue signal politically correct mindless babble.

    Its hard to tell.

    • Microsoft software is only relevant on 3 fronts.

      1.) Ease of use for novice users.

      2.) Mainstream AAA Gaming.

      3.) Business computing for companies that are primarily a Windows House.

  • Sorry, that's as far as I got, couldn't even get to ignore the summary and the article properly.

  • ... your research. The borders can be added more easily at the application development stage.

  • The eventual winner will be AI.

    It will get developed. In different places, by different people, with different methodologies. Ideas moving backwards and forwards. Slowly becoming more and more competent. And certainly becoming more and more pervasive.

    There is only the ladder. And one of the smartest ones will get to the top.

    Incidentally, the Allies and Axis did not cooperate during WW2. Yet it is surprising how they had parallel technological achievements at almost the same time. Aircraft, Radar, Jet

    • There has been AI (Algorithmic Inference) ever since computers were first used to calculate ballistic trajectories.

  • billg is way out of touch.

    We've had five internets for quite a few years now.

    Even the ones you know about include three - China, US standard, US research - and that doesn't include the other two we don't tell you about.

  • Dec 1989: “allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by OTHER PEOPLES BROWSERS is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company”, Bill Gates

    April 1995: “our plans continue to underestimate the importance of an OPEN unified approach for the internet”, Bill Gates

    April 1995: “the Internet is taking away our power every day and will have eroded it irretrievably by the time broadband is pervasive”, Bill Gates

    Jan 1997: “With Netscape and
  • This AI bubble will pop too, and so will the next one and so on until people stop getting an erection from it. Then we will have the godlike genie we all want to rule us.
  • Bill Gates loves the Chinese Communist Party --- that's why he handed over the source code for Windows and then what did the CCP next do, used it and other purloined code to hack into the Pentagon, defense contractors, Boeing, various corporations and the OPM --- one of the worst national security breaches ever! Bill admires them 'cause they steal stuff the way BillG's outfit sole the code to CP/M and called it MS-DOS! Plus, when BillyG joined those Bilderbergers, he met fellow CCP-lover, David Rockefelle

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