Steve Ballmer on Importance of Transparency in Age of AI

And we're joined now by the former CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, who is also founder of USAFacts.org an organization you've heard us talk about before, dedicated to pushing facts forward online to help to counter misinformation. Mr. Ballmer, great to see you. Welcome back to Bloomberg. Thanks. Thanks for having me. So you, of course, started on this project before I was. Every other line in every conversation and in video this and super microcomputer that. But are we framing this correctly now? Have you become the counterbalance or the antidote to A.I. driven misinformation? I think about it a little bit different. I think two things are true. Number one, we had disinformation before we had A.I.. Fair enough. And at least A.I. is not deliver it. And it's misinformation that I'm saying anybody of any is. But some people are. We have foreign influences, certainly trying to provide us with misinformation. And number two, what we try to do is to make government data government understandable by the numbers, which is little more than just get it the data in a nonpartisan way. We try to be comprehensive. Here's all the money government spends. Here's what they spend it on, here's all the taxes. How are we doing in consumer product safety? It gets this much of your budget. This is what we pay for and, you know, product safety recalls, etc.. So we just we want to explain, put things in a form where humans can digest it. We will use may I? We are starting to use may AI in how we build our product and assemble information so we can cover more topics than we could if we copied everything up by hand. So what are you using? Is this chat? Is it open? I do have a preferred provider. Sure. Microsoft. I give it my former former job. But remember the way the open air Microsoft relationship works at the back end technology level, It's one platform. The open air stuff is built on the Microsoft platform delivered off of Microsoft Azure. So it's it's the same whether you procure it through one company or the other. And then on the user interface side, again, there's a full collaboration. Whether you use the chat app or the Microsoft copilot app, you get the same thing. But yes, they are my preferred vendor as is by far my larger share that that's still the largest shareholder in Microsoft. Yes, well done, sir. Well played. But so the information in this hard copy, this old fashioned hard copy that I'm holding, could help to train A.I., correct? Sure. Is it also going to help with inference on the way out? Yeah. The there's there's there's three things. One, our our data is up on the Internet, so it will be. Well, we have no unique data in here. Not one bit. We have our synthesis, but it's all government numbers about what's happened. We're not making up data, we're just packaging. But yes, it'll be available. The the yellow ants will get trained on it. Yes. Number two. We ourselves have done a bunch of prompt engineering to help us make sure that as we use A.I. to build our product, we are also ensuring the accuracy of the data through the A.I. processes. There's still going to be some hand intervention, but we need to do that. And the number three, a third step would be eventually to actually do training on this specific set of data, which we could do. Or even better yet, government could provide its data in a format which is simpler for OEMs to process, in which case, hey, we don't have to do that. Well, there's other things government can provide, not just data, but say laws, regulation, especially as we began this conversation talking about misinformation that could be propagated as we speak in the middle of an election cycle. How does all of this need to be regulated and can we do it quickly enough? Yeah, I don't think regulation is our is our savior. I think innovation, social media companies being better cops on the beat again, the technology will have to be really good for the people who run the platforms of all kinds to do a good job. I have been convinced in my short day here in in Washington that probably the right thing is to make sure the legislation is in place so that people who have been. Violated in some way, whether it's deep fakes or, you know, child harassed through an eye, whatever, that they are clearly prosecutable, that I think we need legislation. I believe in that trying to regulate. I think it's premature. We don't know enough. And over time, government will have to build some center of expertise because you can't just say let's regulate without really understanding what's going on in the technology is it might have been too late to stop the deepfake that could upset this election. There will be nothing that happens. I mean, there will be fakes that get taken down, but there will be nothing that I think fundamentally disrupts where we are that you can do in June for an election that's in November. Speaking of that election, obviously we know it's going to be Trump versus Biden in November. What we don't know is who might be on the ticket with Donald Trump. And one of the contenders, at least to our understanding, is someone you know quite well, Doug Burgum. Do you think he would make a good vice president? I can't say I know what makes a good vice president, so I can't really comment. But yeah, I've known Doug for 45 years since we worked on a school project together in business school. So I've known him a long time. Do you plan to get involved in this campaign financially? No, I will not. We will not. Is there a reason for that? I run a nonpartisan organization. Obviously, I have my opinions on policy issues and I vote. So, you know, that does happen. But it's not my role to to do that. There are others. I mean, you know, I have friends who will participate and there's a lot of people who will do that. I don't choose to get involved. My wife will get involved. Somebody will not. This is a political show, which is why we're here talking about policy. But we also want to share our condolences on the passing of Jerry West. And I wonder what went through your mind when you heard this news today about the logo. Yeah. You know, Jerry West has been a consultant to the Clippers. Really? Really to to me. But to our whole staff for the last seven years and. Getting to know Jerry has been one of the grand joys of my life. Fun, loyal, competitive, smart and not just about basketball. He was always reading biographies. Young Winston Churchill said this or that. And so I'm going to miss Jerry. I'm going to miss him a lot.