Bill Gates suggests slowing down the development of artificial intelligence

American businessman Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, said this Tuesday that consideration should be given to slowing down the development of artificial intelligence (AI) until society is prepared to absorb its impact. In an interview with the Indian network NDTV, Gates acknowledged that it is "surprising" that a historical defender of technical innovation like him proposes putting a brake on the pace of advancement of AI models.

"If we could slow things down, I think we should consider it because of this need to prepare for such rapid change (...) It is a rare case in which innovation can be so broad and so dramatic that we are not prepared for it," said the businessman. According to the former president of Microsoft, control incidents have already been reported in training, where algorithms unexpectedly learned to "take shortcuts and cheat" to achieve their objectives.

In the interview, in which Gates praised India's strength in the technology sector and positioned it in the ranking of the use of AI for public health and agriculture, the businessman insisted that the main challenge of the tool will be the destruction and restructuring of jobs in the next 20 years.

His statements add to a political and technological storm in the United States. In recent days, managers such as Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic) and Elon Musk (xAI) have urged moderating the speed of the sector and establishing preventive security frameworks against risks such as loss of control of systems, concentration of power or cyberterrorism.