Bill Gates is reportedly still very involved at Microsoft after his departure from its board

In March 2020, Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and its CEO for a long period, officially left the company when he departed as one of the members of its board of directors. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that Gates left the board because of an investigation into an alleged personal relationship he had with a Microsoft employee in 2000. A spokesperson for Gates denied at the time that the investigation was the cause of his resignation from Microsoft's board.

However, even though Gates stated he was going to spend more time on his philanthropy efforts, a new report from Business Insider, using unnamed sources, says that Gates has been working in stealth mode for Microsoft for some time.

Indeed, the article claims that Gates was one of the major forces behind Microsoft's current partnership with OpenAI. The article claims Gates had been holding meetings with OpenAI since 2016. It also claims that in 2022, Gates challenged OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman to create a Large Language Model that could pass the Advanced Placement biology exam.

The report says that in August 2022, Altman showed Gates, and Microsoft's current CEO Satya Nadella, a demo in Gates' home where a version of GPT-4 did indeed pass that biology exam. It added:

The demo prompted Gates to write another memo — what one former executive referred to as "the memo" — spelling out how Microsoft should use GPT-4. Gates stressed that the large language model, trained on the entirety of the public internet, could finally usher in the era of personal agents.

The report said that after that demo and Gates' memo, Nadella reportedly held a company meeting where he asked his teams to incorporate AI into many of its software products and services.

Gates is still holding meetings with a number of top Microsoft executives to examine the company's project developments, Gates is also supposed to be helping with both the recruitment of new executives as well as trying to keep the current Microsoft team members. It would see that Gates may not be an official employee but he still hold a lot of power in Redmond,