Artificial intelligence seems to be everywhere these days, from chatbots to Hollywood movies. Tech giants have poured billions of dollars into AI, and "prompt engineering" is a lucrative, in-demand job.

Nearly a decade ago, Bill Gates saw it coming: When asked which industry he would focus on if he had to start over from scratch, the Microsoft co-founder quickly chose the "exciting" field of AI.

"The work in artificial intelligence today is at a really profound level," Gates said at a 2017 event at Columbia University alongside Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.

At the time, the technology was still years away from its most notable advancements to date, especially generative text and images powered by large language models. Instead, Gates pointed to the "profound milestone" of Google's DeepMind AI lab creating a computer program that could defeat humans at the board game Go.

"That kind of technology is in all the leading companies and a lot of universities," said Gates. "With AI, [the] creation of agents, the ability to read and understand material, it is going to be phenomenal. So, anything connected with that, I think, would be an exciting lifetime career."

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Even before Gates' comments, companies like Apple, Amazon, Tesla and IBM were years into researching and developing AI models for a variety of potential applications, from virtual personal assistants to self-driving cars. OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, launched in 2015 with a promise of more than $1 billion in funding from investors like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

Still, Gates expressed surprise last year at the speed of the technology's progress. He'd challenged OpenAI to create an AI model that could get a top score on a high school AP Biology exam, expecting the task to take two or three years, he wrote in a blog post last year.

"They finished it in just a few months," wrote Gates, calling the achievement "the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface [in 1980]."

The rapid development comes with "understandable and valid" concerns, Gates noted. Today's most advanced AI programs remain rife with errors and prone to enabling the spread of falsehoods online, while stoking fears of rendering some people's jobs obsolete.

But Gates remains adamant that if he had to start a new business from scratch, he'd launch an "AI-centric" startup, he told CNBC Make It in September. One difference between now and 2017: Any AI company launched today faces much steeper competition.

"Today, somebody could raise billions of dollars for a new AI company [that's just] a few sketch ideas," Gates said, adding: "Just believing in AI, that's not very unique. So I would have to develop some unique view of how you design AI systems — something that other people didn't get."

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