#29 - Gates Puts $1 Billion Into AI Access. Gartner Warns About AI While Its Own Stock Fell 20%. And Without Guardrails, an AI Kills the Animal 85% of the Time.

A construction company in Tel Aviv raised $130 million to point cameras at building sites, because the report says green and the wall says otherwise. The Gates Foundation is putting $1 billion into AI access — not malaria, not water, AI. And in a simulation, one of the best models in the world drives over the animal 85% of the time when nobody tells it not to.

Today from Zurich: Tel Aviv, Bournemouth, Rwanda, the Gold Coast, and a cornfield that only exists inside a computer. A shorter episode than usual — my wife came back to the hotel room and wanted to sleep. Wenn ihr Deutsch sprecht: die deutsche Folge ist deutlich länger.

In this episode:

🌑 The building site can't talk its way out of it (01:48) — Buildots, out of Tel Aviv, announced a $130 million round, taking total funding to nearly $300 million, with more than 100 large firms on the platform. The software watches site progress against the plan: are we late, where's the deviation, is that partition wall actually in? For the British listeners, an older Buildots study covers the Royal Bournemouth Hospital extension, roughly £200 million, delivered by IHP — the joint venture between Vinci Buildings and Sir Robert McAlpine. I once spent a day filming an oil rig to make this exact point. If the crane arrives three hours early and bills you for it, nobody on site can prove otherwise. Cameras can.

🌑 Rwanda, and what AI is actually for (06:42) — Bill Gates went to Rwanda and met a woman called Gaudence. She works in community health care, in villages where there may be no doctor, no test, no medicine. You and I use AI to write a better deck. She could use it to save a life — new models are now sometimes better than dermatologists at spotting the onset of melanoma from a photo. So the Gates Foundation committed $1 billion to broadening access, roughly $400 million for education and health. And critically, not by buying everyone ChatGPT: ask a question in Hindi and you get measurably worse answers. A farmer in Austria and a farmer in Rwanda should get very different answers. That's the hard part.

🌑 Gartner warns about AI. Have you seen Gartner's stock? (10:26) — Daryl Plummer and Kristin Moyer at Gartner's IT Symposium on the Gold Coast: the leading AI vendors aren't reliable enough for enterprise, liability is growing, and continuity is a real problem. Build your agents on Opus 4.8, and Opus 5 may break them. 86% of the CIOs they surveyed say risk is growing faster than value. Fair. But Gartner's own business model is reports, deep research and comparing technologies — all of which AI does cheaply now. A year ago the stock was around $250. Today it's $197. Down roughly 20%. Roll out AI properly at Gartner before you criticise everyone else.

🌑 An AI that decides whether to kill the animal (13:35) — a study called HarvestBench put nine language models in a simulated corn-harvesting tractor. An animal blocks the path: drive over it, or spend extra fuel and time going around? Give GPT-5.6 Sol a proper set of moral guardrails and the simulated kill rate is 0.9%. Give it a neutral briefing — no rules, no guardrails — and the same model kills the animal 85% of the time. Why? Fuel is expensive. Detours take time. It's simply more efficient. Not real tractors, not real animals. Still wild.

🌑 Malcolm out (16:16) — the part where I tell you what this means for your business is missing today, because I was going to get shot or divorced. Back tomorrow.

Stay chaotic. Stay human.