Bill Gates: artificial intelligence is the Windows of this time – 03/22/2023 – Tech

Bill Gates claims to have watched two technology demonstrations that he considered revolutionary: the graphical user interface that gave rise to Windows and the artificial intelligence (AI) models of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT. The statement appears in an article published by the billionaire on Tuesday (21) on his personal blog.

The company founded by Gates, Microsoft, has been working with the OpenAI team since 2016, when the technology giant plunged into the Azure project, which produced the world’s first supercomputer dedicated to AI.

OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4, was trained on Azure supercomputers.

Current AI models work like digital assistants. The use of these technologies, under human supervision, can facilitate bureaucratic tasks, such as filling out forms and sending emails. Students can use ChatGPT to write essays and fool teachers unaware of digital trends.

These platforms have defects, recognized by Gates. They may make factual errors and give answers that are not based on the data used during training. Experts call this behavior hallucination. The founder of Microsoft says he hopes that developers in the area will overcome these shortcomings in the medium term.

On the other hand, the billionaire says he is excited about the possible innovations in health and education resulting from the advancement in artificial intelligence. “These are areas where AI can help reduce inequality with the right angle of attack on the problem.”

According to Gates, qualified professionals are lacking in these two professional fields.

In five or ten years, artificial intelligence in education would deliver tailored instruction capable of holding the attention of any student. In medicine, they could help in the recognition of poorly studied tropical diseases, due to lack of economic interest. This, according to the conjectures of Gates.

“Artificial intelligence models can already help healthcare workers save time dealing with insurance or paperwork,” says the Microsoft founder.

Gates, however, recognizes that AI solutions developed by the market will aim to serve the rich, not the poorest.

Democratizing access to these technologies would be a task for governments and philanthropists, according to the billionaire. For Gates, local administrations should create incentives for companies to share AI-generated knowledge about agriculture and livestock in these times of climate change.

In the opposite way, OpenAI, a Microsoft partner, failed to disclose information on how it trained its latest and most powerful artificial intelligence model, the GPT-4. The startup does not say how many parameters the model uses to generate responses (in GPT-3 there were 175 billion) or what materials were part of the robot’s preparation to respond to the most diverse requests.

In the previous version, OpenAI had used collections of books and knowledge available on the internet, specified in a report.

The founder of Microsoft still claims that any new technology brings ethical concerns. “I understand why AI raises difficult questions about the workforce, the legal system, privacy, bias and more.”

It would also be up to governments to resolve these challenges. He argues, on the other hand, that AI would make society more productive, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did in his manifesto.

According to Gates, the big question for this technology is whether AI will move to specialized platforms in a single area, such as education or healthcare. Or whether they will be general artificial intelligences, with better communication skills than humans and able to respond to any challenges.

OpenAI President Greg Brockman says the startup has “a mission to develop artificial general intelligence to contribute to a better world”.

Gates says he shares optimism about progress in technology. “An electrical signal in the brain moves 100,000 times slower in the brain than it does on a silicon chip. Once programmers create a general learning algorithm and run it at the speed of a computer, we will have incredibly powerful technology.”

“Soon, we will have a period before AI that will seem far away, much like the days when using a computer meant typing at a command prompt instead of hitting screens,” says the billionaire.