Bill Gates says the world will change faster than we think

Everything will change, and very quickly. In the middle of last year, Bill Gates met with the OpenAI team behind the revolutionary ChatGPT. At this meeting, he decided to challenge them: the tycoon asked them to train this artificial intelligence to take an advanced biology exam. The task was set as follows - to show whether AI can answer questions that he did not specifically study. Bull Gates said then: "If you can do this, then you will make a real breakthrough."

Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, thought that this task would have to be completed within two to three years. Just a few months later, we were all caught up in the AI launch frenzy. But it was not the result of the test, which the AI also successfully passed, that allowed the billionaire to appreciate the milestone we are experiencing. Artificial intelligence was able to answer a rather intimate, personal question: “What would you say to a father with a sick child?”.

The AI "wrote a thoughtful response that was probably better than most of us would have given," the entrepreneur admits in an article he published yesterday on his blog. "The whole experience was impressive." It was then, he says, that he realized that he was witnessing the most important technological breakthrough since the days of the graphical user interface. In other words: he understood that this invention would change “the way people work, study, travel, receive medical care and communicate with each other.”

Bill Gates says that in two years AI will be able to improve its abstract reasoning

Bill Gates, the protagonist of the PC and Internet revolution, claims this as an announcement: "The AI era has begun." He believes that everything before AI will seem as far away as the days when using a computer meant typing on the command line rather than touching the screen.

Everything is changing, and very quickly. The software industry is no longer run by a few, as it was in the early days of personal computer development. Today it is a global industry focused on a single goal: unleashing the potential of AI. Gates predicts that the next decade will be pivotal in this regard.

He acknowledges that AI models still struggle with abstract reasoning. For example: when you ask him for advice on a trip you want to take, he may suggest hotels that are no longer available. Gates explains this by saying that existing models do not understand the context of the request well enough. “These are not fundamental limitations,” the entrepreneur says, adding that such failures can be fixed within two years or less.

For example, just recently OpenAI showed that GPT-4, its latest release, can even understand memes and even explain why they are funny. This new AI model operates in a multi-modal fashion, allowing it to process images, sounds and videos. This is still far from what Gates is talking about, but it's a breakthrough, after all, it's only been three months since the launch of ChatGPT.

A decade of transformation in work and health

Bill Gates has said this before: AI is not here to take your job. However, he explains that the employment sector, as well as education and health care, will undergo major transformations in the next five to ten years. Gates' predictions have been known since he predicted a pandemic like the one we're experiencing with the coronavirus in 2015.

Bill Gates, of course, mentions Microsoft 365 Copilot, the GPT-4 integration with Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and the rest of Microsoft 365 tools. At the moment, it's only available in testing to a select group of customers. The company has promised that it will bring these features to more users in the coming months.