Bill Gates believes ChatGPT is the most revolutionary tech in decades but has risks too

By Divyanshi SharmaBill Gates has often been vocal about his love for Artificial Intelligence. The billionaire philanthropist has praised ChatGPT on more than one occasion and has also said in the past that AI will help humans to be more efficient in their jobs. With the popularity of ChatGPT, people are beginning to talk about AI and its potential merits as well as demerits. While one section of people believes that AI can be destructive for humanity and might replace certain jobs, another section says that the tool is a blessing in disguise and will help humans be more efficient.

Amidst all this, the Microsoft co-founder has penned a new blog highlighting the uses of AI along with its possible risks.

Bill Gates on AI’s abilities

The title of Gates’ blog is ‘The age of AI has begun’ and he starts off by writing that the development of Artificial Intelligence is the second revolutionary tech. The first one was in 1980 when he was introduced to a graphical user interface.

In the blog, Bill Gates goes on to list some uses of AI which will be of huge help to the human race. Some of these uses involved AI reducing ‘world’s worst inequities’, bringing change in the education sector and transforming the way children learn, helping improve the health sector, enhancing employees’ productivity at workplaces, and so on.

“As computing power gets cheaper, GPT’s ability to express ideas will increasingly be like having a white-collar worker available to help you with various tasks. Microsoft describes this as having a co-pilot. Fully incorporated into products like Office, AI will enhance your work—for example by helping with writing emails and managing your inbox,” his blog post reads.

The billionaire also said that people should think of AI as their ‘personal assistant’ who can help them with basic tasks. “In addition, advances in AI will enable the creation of a personal agent. Think of it as a digital personal assistantIt will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with. This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do,” he wrote.

Bill Gates’ challenge to OpenAI

Bill Gates also revealed that he had been meeting ChatGPT creator OpenAI’s team from 2016 and was quite impressed by their work. He also wrote that he challenged the team to train an AI to pass an Advanced Placement biology exam. “If you can do that, I said, then you’ll have made a true breakthrough,” Gates wrote. He added that to his surprise, the team finished the task in a couple of months instead of taking years.

“I thought the challenge would keep them busy for two or three years. They finished it in just a few months,” he wrote.

Talking about meeting the OpenAI team for the second time, Gates said, “In September, 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. Then it wrote outstanding answers to six open-ended questions from the exam. We had an outside expert score the test, and GPT got a 5—the highest possible score, and the equivalent to getting an A or A+ in a college-level biology course.”

Bill Gates on AI’s risks

Gates also wrote about the possible risks of AI and says there exists a possibility of AI going rogue and deciding that human beings are the threat. However, such concerns are ‘no more urgent today than they were before the AI developments of the past few months’.

His blog reads, “Then there’s the possibility that AIs will run out of control. Could a machine decide that humans are a threat, conclude that its interests are different from ours, or simply stop caring about us? Possibly, but this problem is no more urgent today than it was before the AI developments of the past few months.”

Gates adds, “These “strong” AIs, as they’re known, will probably be able to establish their own goals. What will those goals be? What happens if they conflict with humanity’s interests? Should we try to prevent strong AI from ever being developed? These questions will get more pressing with time. But none of the breakthroughs of the past few months have moved us substantially closer to strong AI. Artificial intelligence still doesn’t control the physical world and can’t establish its own goals.”

Concluding the post, Bill Gates wrote that despite the risks, AI will be dominating the public discussion for a ‘foreseeable future’ and that we need to balance our fears about downside of AI since it has just begun to emerge.

He adds, “We’re only at the beginning of what AI can accomplish. Whatever limitations it has today will be gone before we know it,” he said.