My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

I don't think that is the assumption. The assumption is that people will treat them well for planning to give away their money without them needing to live their life without their precious wealth.

I understand the idea of learning from everyone, even those whose values I strongly disagree with.

But after learning about everything Elon has done in the public sphere, would this statement be more likely just narcissism rather than a deep and inspiring virtue?

Interestingly, I think AI, if its biggest boosters are correct, will end up being an absolute disaster for disadvantaged people.

The fact is that the vast majority of people in the current world are able to survive by selling their labor. If AI makes it so that, say, 50% of the world's population is no longer able to survive by selling their labor, that leads to massive serfdom, not some sort of Star Trek utopia.

And the thing that is shocking to me is that I haven't seen any (like, absolutely zero) credible explanation from AI boosters of how this dystopian end state is avoidable. I've either heard misdirection (e.g. yes, I agree AI is amazing at what it can do, but that doesn't explain how people will eat if they don't have jobs), vague handwavy-ness, or "kumbaya talk" about stuff like basic income that seems to completely ignore human nature.

I would absolutely love to be convinced I'm wrong, but that would need to start with at least something approaching a rational argument as to how the benefits of AI will be more equally distributed, and I have yet to hear that.

I think you’re on the right track, and, alongside the scale of service (reaching more people and more topics with an average level of advice or recognition), there’s a second component to it: scale of analysis. The newly possible solutions that AI advances have created include more than those famous models that answer broad prompts with art, copy, or code.

They also include focused, sometimes incomprehensible tasks which can only be done at an impactful scale due to the creation of deep learning and advances in compute-inexpensive language understanding, computer vision, and audio analysis:

A network of affordable, durable, solar powered, LoRa meshed audio sensors analyzed by a model to diagnose changes in the biodiversity of the Amazon and other rainforests (via ambient bird and animal calls across thousands of species). Visual analysis done on a cheap camera network estimates herd sizes of larger, silent animals.

A model that analyzes satellite imagery to evaluate major shifts in the industrial use of land, including tracking the national development of solar farms to evaluate nations receiving new energy grants.

A social analysis bot that tracks the rapid introduction of propaganda narratives or intentional agitation by foreign state actors (Russian bot farms), including building a map of associated IPs. Sadly, the social networks basically shrugged when given this data, so Msft gave it to LEAs.

These things are being done at a scale that would be incomprehensible to an organization of people.

Scale of analysis tasks are still, IMO the smartest use of AI today, despite the fashionable trend of GPT and the promise of AGI. A few models to spark ideas:

Recognition tasks with a dictionary too deep for human experts to grok when scaled up - like identifying thousands of wildlife

Recognition tasks with a timescale too rapid or sudden for human attention - Amazon Prime Vision predicting a QB sack in a football game before it happens

Recognition tasks when human vigilance or sensitivity would miss an occasional or slight occurrence - measuring eccentricities in electrical signals, vibrations, etc. to predict the failure of industrial equipment

It is good for the other use cases, but it is the worst possible source of advice on subjects where the user has no expertise, and where there are serious health or safety consequences for getting it wrong.

...this is a really interesting idea, but I'm not sure if it's entirely true?

If we're talking about a business's core competency, I think the assertion makes sense. You need to be better than your competition.

But businesses also need a whole lot of people to work in human resources, file taxes, and so on. (Not to mention clean bathrooms, but that's less relevant to the generative AI discussion.) I can certainly imagine how having a world-class human resource team could provide a tire manufacturer with a competitive advantage. However, if those incredible HR employees are also more expensive, it might make more sense to hire below-average people to do your HR and invest more in tire R&D.

  > but I expect the [Gates] foundation will spend more than $200 billion between now and 2045

  Top 10 individuals in the world worth $1.77 trillion

  The U.S. government has spent $ 3.57 trillion in fiscal year 2025

Are you sure about that?

Let's say every employee gets a $1000 round trip flight, plus $2000 for 4 nights in a decent hotel, a total of $3000 per head. Are you telling me that employee is paid $1000 a year or less?

Just googling it delivers enough critisism on worst level than you think Bill Gates Foundation is: "misusing funds, poor logistical planning, inadequate responses to specific crises, and even allegations of fraud and theft. "

Impact matters. Impact doesn't mean to just give money to some organization. Bill Gates actually played a significant role in Ebola vacination. Why? Because he/his team revisted why just giving out vacines was not enough.

Impact means helping as efficient as possible with the money.

And btw. a lot of other charities of this style (especially christians ones we all know) have also borderline ways of missusing believers to do their work. My aunt worked for nuns and got paid shit. This is now a problem for her retirment. Guess who pays that? Yeah the state...

Let's say you just won the startup lottery and you've got a significant amount of now tradable stock. Some of which was early exercised and the cost basis is effectively zero. Some of which was RSUs or non-qualified options and you owe ordinary income. And that you're way over into the top tax brackets.

If your zero cost basis stock is Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS), there's a very nice discount on federal capital gains, so you might not need to do the rest of the stuff.

Otherwise, if you donate your apprechiated zero basis stock, you get to save federal capital gains of 20% + 3.8% net investment income. Plus it offsets against your ordinary income that's 37%. So that's a 60.8% discount on being charitable for the feds. If you live in California, capital gains are regular income, so you're saving 13.3% because the capital gains go away and offsetting 13.3% on your ordinary income, so your total discount is 87.4%. In other words, your difference in cash after taxes for selling $1M of zero basis stock or donating $1M of zero basis stock is $126k.

When the government is telling you it only costs $126k to give a charity $1M, it's pretty compelling. The math used to be different, when you'd get credit for state taxes on the federal return, but that was many years ago now.

The waste, fraud, and abuse that runs rampant throughout the government tells us that the powerful often use taxpayer dollars as their own slush fund.

Sure the government does much to relieve the suffering of people around the globe; but it could do far more with substantially less.

I think there is value to letting people allocate some percentage of their income directly to causes they are passionate about. Even if you assume the government is efficient and not bloated, and benevolent, this lets people contribute to causes without waiting for political consensus, or to smaller causes that would not be on the government's radar (yet) or ever. It's more pluralistic. It lets smaller causes bloom. It keeps me civically engaged.

On a personal note, I do take issue with the amounts spent on "defense" (which is often bombing people or threatening to directly or indirectly), and would rather help folks than bomb other folks.

And it’s not like we’re talking about some huge sacrifices here. Go from a 50K sqft house to a “modest” 10k sqft one. Don’t sail around on personal yachts. Fly commercial. Use Zoom. Simple stuff that would give them a lot more credibility. As it is, it’s a whole lot of “do as I say, not as I do.”

This has always been the sticking point for me when it comes to supporting large charities.

The way to fight climate change is to keep people at a low level of consumption, and spend his own money very slowly, very scarcely. And keep people with small cars, no Cadillac for any consultant.

Maybe my judgement or efficiency is bad when I try to help my neighbor. Okay, whoopsie. Now apply that margin of error to a foundation whose decisions impact millions of people and possibly entire societies, possibly for generations. The unintended or possibly negative effects can be enormous and long-lasting.

Operating at a huge scale requires you to lump people together into groups and make assumptions about who they are and what they deserve, as you've done in your example. To me that sounds antithetical to the concept of charity. And even with the best intentions, if you mess up, you're messing up a huge scale.

This is just one example of the Kreuger-Dunning that permeates all aspects of the Gates Foundation. His interventions have been mainly disasters, distorted public policy, and gobbled up biotech IP in the process. He controls the money spicket and is very petty and cocksure about what is "right." Researchers and public policy experts who disagree with his ideas get cut off.

Governments should set public health policy and manage the needs of their people, not billionaires, biotech companies, or NGOs.

So to determine X, we can just ask how much money he’d have now had he not given any away, and it looks like he has about 70% less than that.