Bill Gates Believes AI Is a "Revolutionary" Technology
According to the Microsoft co-founder, AI would significantly transform the way people work, learn, travel, receive healthcare, and communicate with one another.
Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and a billionaire philanthropist, has recently spoken up on the topic of AI, saying that artificial intelligence is a technology as revolutionary as mobile phones, computers, and the Internet.
Gates wrote an extensive article on his personal blog, GatesNotes, expressing his opinion that AI would significantly transform the way people work, learn, travel, receive healthcare, and communicate with one another.
"Entire industries will re-orient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it," he said.
According to Gates, AI has the potential to not only increase productivity in the workplace but also address some of the world's most pressing issues such as health, education, and climate change, particularly by reducing inequalities.
As an example, he said that AI could assist healthcare workers by taking care of administrative tasks such as filing insurance claims, handling paperwork, and drafting notes from doctor's visits, allowing them to make better use of their time. Gates highlighted that this could enable healthcare workers in underprivileged countries to attend to more patients, given the limited number of workers available.
Furthermore, the use of AI-driven machinery, according to him, could reduce the need for human intervention in certain tasks, leading to faster diagnoses.
Gates shared that he became fully aware of the potential of AI after witnessing a demonstration by OpenAI, the company responsible for developing the GPT language model. During a meeting in 2022, he challenged the OpenAI team to create an AI that could pass an Advanced Placement (AP) biology exam. Although he initially anticipated that this task would take several years, the team was able to accomplish it within a few months.
"When I met with them again, I watched in awe as they asked GPT, their AI model, 60 multiple-choice questions from the AP Bio exam — and it got 59 of them right," Gates said.
The Microsoft co-founder also expressed his surprise at GPT's reaction to an inquiry that was not scientific in nature. Specifically, he asked what GPT would say to a father whose child was ill. According to him, the language model "wrote a thoughtful answer that was probably better than most of us in the room would have given."
According to Gates, what he witnessed was the most significant technological advancement since the graphical user interface. Despite this, Gates advised people to bear in mind that AI was still in its early stages of development.
Additionally, while acknowledging the technology's potential benefits, he emphasized the need to establish regulations to ensure that AI's advantages far outweighed its drawbacks so that everyone could reap its benefits regardless of their geographic location or financial status.
"Governments and philanthropy will need to play a major role in ensuring that it reduces inequity and doesn’t contribute to it. This is the priority for my own work related to AI," he said.
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