By Mary-Lynn Cesar for Kapitall.

In case you missed it, Bill Gates participated inhis third Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) last week anddiscussed, among other things,turning poop into water, virtual reality headset technology, and artificial intelligence.

The Microsoft ( MSFT ) founder, like Tesla 's( TSLA ) Elon Musk and physicist Stephen Hawking, thinksartificial intelligence should worry mankind. In reponse to a question asking if machines were an existential threat ,Gates wrote, "I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence."

Althoughwe're 15 years away from Skynet rule , significant advances are already taking place within artificial intelligence, and many high profile tech companiesare joining in.

IBM 's ( IBM ) work in artificial intelligence is probably the most well known. In 2011, the company'sWatson computer beat Jeopardy championsKen Jennings and Brad Rutter, capturing a $1 million prize.

Watson has since moved on to bigger and better things. Bloomberg reports thatIBM now wants doctors to use the technology to diagnose diseases . According to the report,Big Bluehas spent the last two years lobbying Congress for an exemption fromlong clinical trials since Watson isn't a medical device. Turns out the efforts might actually pay off:a draft bill released on Tuesday supported IBM's argument and could put Watson on the fast track tousage in the medical community.

Then there's Facebook ( FB ). The social networkcompany recently entered the artificial intelligence conversation with the December launch of its Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab led by NYU researcher Yann LeCun.

And in January,Facebook announced that it was donating artificial intelligence technology to Torch, an open source scientific computing project.

So who else is getting in on the action? Google ( GOOG ) spent 2014 acquiring three British artificial intelligence firms: Dark Blue Labs, Deep Mind, and Vision Factory. The information giant's UK shopping spree is going more smoothly than Hewlett-Packard 's ( HPQ ) infamous 2011 acquisition of Autonomy. Since buying the British software maker, HP has launched its artificial intelligence-powered Enterprise Search, which helps businesses easily find information scattered throughout countless files.

Out in Washington State, Amazon ( AMZN ) and Microsoftare using artificial intelligence to managehumongous data sets and make predictions, including which ad you'll click on and which product you're likely to buy.

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Bill Gates thinks we should be worried about artificial intelligence