Bill Gates Thinks The Next Big Thing In AI Will Comes From An Unknown Startup

During a recent Goldman Sachs and SV Angel event on artificial intelligence (AI), Microsoft Corp. Co-Founder Bill Gates gave his thoughts on the future of AI, including where the biggest potential lies and how it could impact companies such as Amazon.com Inc.

Gates On The Future Of AI

Gates believes that the future leading company in AI will have created a personal digital agent that can perform specific tasks for people.

"Whoever wins the personal agent, that's the big thing, because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you'll never go to Amazon again," he said.

While many people believe that a tech giant — such as Google or Microsoft — will change the AI game, Gates said there's a 50-50 chance that a startup could be the winner of the future. 

"I'd be disappointed if Microsoft didn't come in there," Gates said about the company he co-founded with Paul Allen in 1975. "But I'm impressed with a couple of startups, including Inflection."

That's not all Gates talked about during the Goldman Sachs and SV Angel event. He also touched on the following:

• Future digital agent development: Gates believes that the development of a powerful, future digital agent will take some time before it’s ready for the mainstream. In the meantime, companies will continue to incorporate generative AI technologies, similar to OpenAI’s widely used ChatGPT.
• AI's impact on health innovations: He mentioned that his work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has focused on health-related initiatives. He is confident that AI will hasten advancements in healthcare and pave the way for more sophisticated drug development processes.
• Progress in disease treatment: Despite the complexity of the human brain still baffling scientists, Gates is optimistic about humanity’s progress in developing drugs to treat diseases like Alzheimer’s. He suggested that human trials for such new medications could be initiated within the next decade.
• AI’s influence on white-collar and blue-collar jobs: Gates sees the advent of generative AI technologies, capable of generating convincing text, as a game-changing factor that could affect white-collar jobs. 

All of this information makes it easy to see that Gates is bullish on the future of AI and its ability to have a positive impact on individuals and businesses alike. 

Investing In AI Startups

Thanks to changes in federal law, it’s actually possible for everyday investors to invest in startups on platforms like StartEngine and Wefunder. And AI startups have become some of the most popular startup investments among retail investors. AtomBeam, for example, uses AI to compact data by up to 75% and previously raised nearly $2.5 million from retail investors on StartEngine. On Wefunder, startups like Snapify have developed AI-based solutions for the photography industry and seen significant traction.