AI Is ‘The Hottest Topic Of 2023′ : Bill Gates Forbes Interview
The Microsoft cofounder talked to Forbes Magazine about his work with AI unicorn OpenAI and back on Microsoft’s campus, AI’s potential impact on jobs and in medicine, and much more.
Here are the #BigIdeas from the exclusive interview.
AI is an important milestone in digital technology
Bill Gates has been interested in AI since the beginning of his journey in the software industry. He was fascinated by the idea of computers that could see, hear, and write and machine learning techniques that work well in speech and image recognition. He wrote about this in his ‘Tidal Wave’ memo back in 1995!
He knew Sam Altman and Greg Brockman from OpenAI and was impressed by their innovative work in reinforcement learning on top of large language models.
Gates is excited about the progress in AI and thinks it ranks up there with the four most important milestones in digital technology, including the PC, the PC with a graphical user interface, and the internet.
ChatGPT makes mistakes!
Open AI’s Chat GPT is truly imperfect.
Nobody suggests it doesn’t make mistakes, and it’s not very intuitive. And then, with something like math, it’ll just be completely wrong. Before it was trained, its self-confidence in a wrong answer was also mind blowing.
Building AI and AGI responsibly
OpenAI was founded with safety and security in mind. They are not a purely profit-driven organization, though they do want to have the resources to build big machines to take this stuff forward. And that will cost tens of billions of dollars, eventually, in hardware and training costs.
But the near-term issue with AI is a productivity issue. It will make things more productive and that affects the job market. The long term-issue, which is not yet upon us, is what people worry about: the control issue. What if the humans who are controlling it take it in the wrong direction? All this is still up for debate.
Blue collar and white collar
Gates is well aware that AI will change the way people work and do business, and that there will be job loss as a result.
Repetitive blue collar and physical jobs will be affected first, but that tasks that involve reading and writing fluency will also be impacted by AI(This is happening as of right now!).
This could open up new opportunities in the legal world, or in the processing invoices world, or in the medical world. Just like it is providing new opportunities and disruptive uses for search.
The most fun thing created by AI
That it can do fun stull like composing poems is amazing. The fact that you can say: “write it like Shakespeare” and it does — that creativity has been fun to have.
Gates often turn to AI just for fun things. And he is delighted that the poem compositions by AI are not what he could have done himself!
We had to train it to do Sudoku, and it would get it wrong and say, “Oh, I mistyped.” Well, of course you mistyped, what does that mean? You don’t have a keyboard, you don’t have fingers! But you’re “mistyping?” Wow.
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