Bill Gates speaks to CNBC at Abu Dhabi Finance Week.
CNBC
Bill Gates has warned that some highly valued AI companies will lose out in the “hypercompetitive” AI industry, as investors weigh whether a bubble is about to burst.
“AI is the biggest thing happening,” he said. microsoft the founder and philanthropist told CNBC's Tania Bryer at Abu Dhabi Finance Week, amid rising capital expenditures and a series of circular deals making the market nervous.
“Does this mean that all these companies with high valuations are going to be winners? No, it's going to be hypercompetitive,” Gates said Monday.
“AI is just a bubble in the sense that not all of these valuations will end up going up. Some of them will go down,” he said, adding that AI was “a profoundly profound technology that will reshape the world. There's no doubt about that.”
Many AI companies have valuations well beyond the averages. Palantir and tesla They have a P/E ratio (the ratio of a stock's price to its earnings per share) well above 200, compared to an average of about 25 of the S&P 500 companies.
Global markets fell in November as fears of a bubble burst gained strength.
Gates said that “a reasonable percentage of those companies will not be worth that much.”
Despite the cold shoulder to AI in some parts of the sector, Gates said AI would fundamentally change lives for the better. “Is this profound and real and is it going to provide all of these benefits, including health, education and agriculture that we're working on? Absolutely, no one should have any doubt about that.”
Earlier this week, the Gates Foundation and other international leaders and philanthropists pledged $1.9 billion to fight polio by providing vaccines to millions of children and strengthening health systems to protect them against other preventable diseases.
Gates predicted that the next year would be important for global health.
“We can take these wonderful commitments that we just made and make sure that we use them very effectively. It will be a year where we will test many of those artificial intelligence tools, the virtual doctor, the support for all African dialects, the agricultural advisor… most of the people in Africa are farmers who have very small plots of land and today they have very low productivity,” he said.
“We want to drastically increase their productivity and we see that it is feasible,” he added.
