Gates Keeper Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates is warning that AI assistants could soon make search engines like Google Search obsolete by profoundly altering the behaviors of users online. “Whoever wins the personal agent, that’s the big thing, because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you’ll never go to Amazon again,” Gates said during a Goldman Sachs event on AI in San Francisco this week, as quoted by CNBC. These AI assistants could “read the stuff you don’t have time to read,” he said, allowing users to get to information without having to use a search engine like Google. While Gates didn’t single out Google’s search engine verbatim on Monday, he predicted in a podcast interview back in February that Google’s “search profits will be down” since Microsoft was able to “move fairly fast” on AI. Tech giants are desperately trying to push themselves into a beneficial pole position to have a chance to become the defacto AI-powered landing page of the internet — and even Gates isn’t entirely certain how it will all play out. AI Wars Gates is giving it a 50-50 chance for the winner of the AI wars to be either a startup or tech giant. “I’d be disappointed if Microsoft didn’t come in there,” he said at Monday’s event. “But I’m impressed with a couple of startups, including Inflection,” referring to a startup co-founded by former DeepMind executive Mustafa Suleyman. Gates has been bullish on…Bill Gates Says AI Is Poised to Destroy Search Engines and Amazon