He was your greatest good friend, and extra centered on his ambition than you had been, studying enterprise magazines as a youngster. His unintentional loss of life at age 17 haunts this ebook, and your life.
Kent helped form me as a forward-looking particular person. After which Paul was studying about chip stuff, and he confirmed it to me. He was two years forward of me however he sought me out.
Paul additionally gave you LSD. Steve Jobs as soon as mentioned that LSD was a formative expertise and opened his thoughts in a method that helped him with creativity and design. I don’t get the impression that taking acid was life-changing for you.
I feel the batch that Steve acquired will need to have actually been good for product design and advertising and marketing. My God, simply assume if I’d had that batch! Yeah, I did some loopy issues after I was younger. Paul deserves some credit score for that. By the point we acquired severe about work, we weren’t doing that anymore.
You additionally briefly write in regards to the well-known time you bought busted for dashing. Had been you freaked out by spending an evening in jail?
No, it was simply form of a humorous factor. They thought it was unusual that anyone so younger had a pleasant automobile—what was the story with this child? Was I a drug supplier or one thing?
You acquire your self a Porsche in your early twenties.
I clearly didn’t match their regular sample. We stored sufficient money round that Paul was capable of come down and bail me out.
Talking of money, on the current Netflix sequence you host, you probably did an episode about inequality. You didn’t condemn the thought of billionaires however advocated for extra equality. How would that work?
The world financial system has created some hyper-rich folks. Like me. And perhaps 50 or 60 others. Elon Musk is on the head of that listing, however with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, there’s lots of people with a shocking stage of wealth. I feel that’s OK. I might have a way more progressive tax system, so I might have a few third as a lot cash as I’ve. It will nonetheless be a huge fortune.
The New York Occasions reported that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is on observe to keep away from $8 billion in property taxes. While you learn that, did you assume, “I ought to seek the advice of his tax lawyer”? Or say that this isn’t a very good factor?
I’m fairly sure I’ve paid extra taxes than anybody alive—over $12 billion. There are strategies I might have used, prefer to borrow in opposition to my Microsoft shares and never promote them. But when individuals are getting away with paying much less in taxes in a authorized method, blaming them is just a little unusual. We ought to vary the tax system.
They’re culpable as a result of they use political strain to protect their loopholes and minimize funding for the IRS.
The votes of those billionaires shouldn’t affect our tax system. Additionally, a number of of the 50 hyper-rich are for extra progressive taxation. I’ve been shocked that even the Democratic Get together hasn’t gone very far to make tax stuff extra progressive. I’m an enormous defender of the property tax, I feel it’s a implausible factor. I might make it even more durable to keep away from it.
{Photograph}: Sinna Nasseri
Let’s discuss synthetic intelligence. You’ve been working with it for years, however you had been sluggish to embrace the current transformational breakthrough of generative AI. It wasn’t till OpenAI did a demo of GPT-4 at your home and aced an AP Biology take a look at that you simply grew to become bullish on it. What was making your preliminary skepticism?
The concept of AI is pervasive all through my entire historical past with computer systems. Bizarrely, after I left Harvard to start out Microsoft, one of many issues I assumed I’d remorse was that the progress in AI in academia may transfer shortly whereas I used to be doing BASIC interpreters. That turned out to be so improper. I anticipated that once we might encode data in a wealthy method, the place it might learn a biology textbook and move the AP examination, that we’d explicitly perceive how we’re encoding that data. As an alternative, we found a bizarre statistical algorithm that we don’t perceive. Why does GPT work? We don’t have a clue. However when OpenAI confirmed me GPT-4, it shocked me that that they had crossed an important threshold. We nonetheless have reliability issues, however we’ve a path now the place I feel these will all get solved.
