Bill Gates and Warren Buffett speak at Columbia University.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images News | Good pictures
Legendary value investor Warren Buffett said he had no expertise in artificial intelligence, but thanks to Bill Gates, he took a crack at the sensational chatbot ChatGPT.
“I guess this is something I don’t understand, but the bill came in at least four or five months ago. [He said] ‘I’m going to show you the latest thing and what you can do with it.’ “I said, ‘Take the song ‘My Way’ and write it in Spanish,” Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick on “Squawk Box” from Tokyo on Wednesday. “Two seconds later, it comes out, it rhymes. All these wonderful things.”
The Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO spent decades telling shareholders that technology was outside his circle of expertise. After avoiding tech stocks for years, the “Oracle of Omaha” bought Apple under the influence of his investment lieutenants and the tech giant has now become one of the biggest and most successful ventures of his career.
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI, which Microsoft is betting billions on. The tool is capable of taking written inputs from users and generating a human-like response.
Buffett recalls Gates saying that one of ChatGPT’s limitations was that it couldn’t tell jokes.
“I don’t know how to tell jokes, but I can tell you that it’s reading every book, every legal opinion. I mean, if you’re doing all kinds of things, the time it saves you is incredible,” Buffett said.
In the end, the 92-year-old investor said he wasn’t sure if advanced technology would benefit the human race.
“I think it’s an incredible technological breakthrough that shows what we can do,” Buffett said. “I think it’s extraordinary, but I don’t know if it will work.”
The technology has fueled concerns about potential abuses. For example, students are using ChatGPT to create entire essays, while hackers have begun testing it to write malicious code.
Gates and Buffett have been friends for more than three decades. The pair co-founded The Giving Pledge, which encourages the world’s super-rich to give at least half of their wealth to charity.
