Microsoft founder-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates smiles throughout the Global Investment Summit on the Science Museum in London on October 19, 2021.
Leon Neal | AFP | Getty Images
Improvements in artificial intelligence are the “most vital” innovation in the intervening time, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said in an interview published Friday.
“This may change our world,” he continued. The applications of generative AI like OpenAI’s ChatGPT could improve office efficiency, drafting invoices and letters, Gates said in a podcast conversation with the German-language business paper, Handelsblatt.
“Today, they require an excessive amount of computation, they are not all the time accurate,” Gates said, “But even this week, you will have announcements from Microsoft and Google, where they’re competing to guide on this space.”
Microsoft announced this week that its Bing search engine will probably be powered partly by ChatGPT AI technology. Google also recently announced Bard, its ChatGPT competitor.
Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975 and led the corporate for over 20 years, before stepping down as CEO in 2000. “I’m biased,” Gates joked, noting that he remained a consultant for the roughly $2 trillion company.
The optimizations that AI can offer for reading and writing, Gates said, will make a “huge impact.” Within the health care and education spaces, Gates said, AI can tangibly improve efficiency and meaningfully improve outcomes.
“The best approach to understand it’s that AI has got excellent at speech recognition and visual recognition, but they essentially couldn’t read,” he said. In other words, traditional AI platforms couldn’t actually process the language they were taking in. But newer platforms, like ChatGPT, are capable of coaching, improving, and reading and writing through recent knowledge.
Gates pointed to applications inside word processing and office tasks as optimal future applications for natural language platforms like ChatGPT.
For example, Gates pointed to a hypothetical integration with Microsoft’s Teams collaboration software, noting that the AI could keep track of the conversation to supply relevant information based on a gathering.
“The progress over the subsequent couple of years to make these items even higher will probably be profound,” Gates said.
