Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) founder Bill Gates was speaking to a group of college students in 2004. According to The New York Times, Gates was a bit concerned about the decline in the number of computer science majors, as well as the notion that the field had matured and there weren't many breakthroughs left to achieve in the area. One student expressed doubt that there would ever be another tech company as successful as Microsoft. ''If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, so machines can learn, that is worth 10 Microsofts.'' Fast-forward to today, and of course someone has figured it out.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) founder Bill Gates was speaking to a group of college students in 2004. According to The New York Times, Gates was a bit concerned about the decline in the number of computer science majors, as well as the notion that the field had matured and there weren't many breakthroughs left to achieve in the area. One student expressed doubt that there would ever be another tech company as successful as Microsoft. ''If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, so machines can learn, that is worth 10 Microsofts.'' Fast-forward to today, and of course someone has figured it out.

Fast-forward to today, and of course someone has figured it out. This special kind of artificial intelligence is called machine learning . If anything, Gates was too conservative in his estimates. Experts say the market opportunity is now far, far greater than 10 Microsofts. Other top business leaders are on board as well.

We've referred to machine learning before as the beginning of today's AI explosion. It's "simply" software that ingests data, learns from it, and can then …

Bill Gates is often called Harvard's most famous dropout. He notably ditched the top university in 1975 to found Microsoft, and became the world's richest man. Looking back, Gates has said he was lucky that computers were a hobby and an obsession of his at a time when they were just starting to change the world. But speaking on Friday at another Ivy League university, Columbia University, along with fellow billionaire and famous investor Warren Buffett, Gates said that if he were to drop out of college today there's a limited chance he would end up in the computer industry, and likely not in developing operating software for companies. Roughly 1,000 people, mostly students, gathered on the campus to hear the two billionaires speak.