Bill Gates likened the development of artificial intelligence-powered ChatGPT to the advent of the personal computer and said that the new technology will be like having a “white-collar worker” as a personal assistant.
“The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone,” Gates wrote in a blog post.
“It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other.”
Gates added: “Entire industries will reorient around it.
“Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.”
“Although humans are still better than GPT at a lot of things, there are many jobs where these capabilities are not used much,” the Microsoft co-founder wrote in a Tuesday blog post titled “The Age of AI has begun.”
Microsoft lately has been pouring billions of dollars into ChatGPT and partnered with OpenAI to add the feature to its Bing search engine.
Gates revealed that since 2016 he has been “meeting with the team from OpenAI” — the Silicon Valley-based AI research firm that rolled out the ChatGPT technology — and was “impressed by their steady progress.”
He wrote that he challenged OpenAI last year to “train an artificial intelligence to pass an Advanced Placement biology exam.”
A few months later, he “watched in awe” after ChatGPT aced 59 of the 60 questions on the exam, Gates wrote.
“I knew I had just seen the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface,” Gates wrote.
“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,” Gates continued.
ChatGPT’s dramatic rise has been met with awe as well as dread by some who predict that it could replace humans in key industries such as journalism, law, and other knowledge-based professions.
According to OpenAI, the chatbot “uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like responses to text inputs in a conversational manner.”
Millions of people have played with it over the past few months, using it to write silly poems or songs, to try to trick it into making mistakes, or for more practical purposes such as helping compose an email.
The New York City Department of Education as well as the school systems in Seattle, Los Angeles, Fairfax County, Va., Montgomery County, Ala., and others have banned students from accessing ChatGPT for fear it could be used to cheat on exams.