Bill Gates: GPT is the most revolutionary technological advancement in 40 years

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said on Tuesday that OpenAI's GPT artificial intelligence model is the most revolutionary technological advancement since he first saw the modern graphical desktop environment (GUI) in 1980. The following is the full text of Bill Gates' article "The Artificial Intelligence Era Has Begun":

The era of artificial intelligence has begun

Artificial intelligence is as revolutionary as mobile phones and the Internet.

In my lifetime I have seen two technology demonstrations that struck me as revolutionary.

The first time was in 1980, when I was introduced to the graphical user interface, the precursor to all modern operating systems, including Windows. I sat down with the guy who showed me the demo, a brilliant programmer named Charles Simonyi, and we immediately started brainstorming about all the things that could be done with this user-friendly method of computing. Charles eventually joined Microsoft, Windows became a pillar of Microsoft, and the thinking we did after the demo helped set the company's agenda for the next 15 years.

The second big surprise happened last year. I've been meeting with the team at OpenAI since 2016 and have been impressed by their steady progress. In mid-2022, I was so excited about their work that I gave them a challenge: train an AI to pass the Advanced Placement Biology exam. Enables them to answer questions for which they have not been specifically trained. (I chose AP Bio because this test is more than a simple regurgitation of scientific facts - it requires you to think critically about biology. I say, if you can do that, then you'll have a real breakthrough.

I thought this challenge would keep them busy for two or three years. They completed it in just a few months.

When I met with them again in September, I watched in awe as they asked GPT, their AI model, the 60 multiple-choice questions on the AP Bio exam—59 of them correct. It then provides excellent answers to six open-ended questions on the exam. We had outside experts score the test, and the GPT received a score of 5—the highest possible score, equivalent to an A or A+ in a college-level biology course.

Once it passed the test, we asked a non-scientific question: "What do you say to a father with a sick child?" It wrote a thoughtful answer that was probably better than what most of us in the room could give. The entire The experience is amazing.

I knew I had just seen the most important technological advance since the graphical user interface.

This inspired me to think about all the things that artificial intelligence can achieve in the next five to ten years.

The development of artificial intelligence is as important as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, access healthcare and communicate with each other. Entire industries will be reoriented around it. Businesses will differentiate themselves by their usage capabilities.

Now that philanthropy is my full-time job, I’m constantly thinking about how artificial intelligence — in addition to helping people be more productive — can reduce some of the world’s worst inequalities. Globally, the worst inequality is in health: 50,000 children under the age of 5 die every year. That's down from 100,000 two decades ago, but still a shockingly high number. Almost all of these children are born in poor countries and die from preventable causes such as diarrhea or malaria. It’s hard to imagine AI doing anything better than saving children’s lives.

I’ve been thinking about how artificial intelligence can reduce some of the world’s worst inequalities.

In the United States, the best chance of reducing inequality is to improve education, especially ensuring student success in math. There is evidence that having basic math skills sets students up for success no matter what career they choose. But math scores are declining nationwide, especially among black, Latino and low-income students. Artificial intelligence can help reverse this trend.

Climate change is another issue where I believe AI can make the world a fairer place. The injustice of climate change is that the people who suffer the most - the world's poorest people - are also the ones who have contributed the least to the problem. I'm still thinking and learning about how AI can help, but later in this post I'll suggest some areas that have huge potential.

In short, I'm excited about the impact of AI on the problems the Gates Foundation studies, and the Foundation will have a lot more to say about AI in the coming months. The world needs to ensure that everyone—not just the wealthy—can benefit from artificial intelligence. Government and philanthropy need to play an important role in ensuring that inequality is reduced, not promoted. This is a priority for my own work related to artificial intelligence.

Any new technology that is so disruptive is bound to make people uneasy, and the same is certainly true of artificial intelligence. I understand why—it raises tough questions about labor, the legal system, privacy, bias, and more. AI also makes factual errors and experiences hallucinations. Before I lay out some ways to reduce risk, I'll define what I mean by artificial intelligence, and I'll go into more detail about some of the ways it will help empower people at work, save lives, and improve education.

Define artificial intelligence

Technically, the term artificial intelligence refers to a model created to solve a specific problem or provide a specific service. What drives things like ChatGPT is artificial intelligence. It's learning how to chat better, but not other tasks. In contrast, the term "general intelligence" refers to software capable of learning any task or subject. AGI doesn’t exist yet—and there’s a fierce debate going on in the computing industry about how to create it, and whether it can be created at all.

Developing AI and AGI has always been the great dream of the computing industry. For decades, the question has been when computers will become better than humans at something other than computing. Now, with the advent of machine learning and massive amounts of computing power, sophisticated artificial intelligence is a reality, and they will get better quickly.

I think back to the early days of the personal computing revolution, when the software industry was small and most of us could get on stage at conferences. Today, it is a global industry. Since a large portion of them are now turning their attention to artificial intelligence, innovation will be much faster than what we experienced after the microprocessor breakthrough. Soon, the pre-AI era seemed as far away as the days when using a computer meant typing at the C:> prompt rather than tapping the screen.

increase productivity

Although humans are still better than GPT at many things, there are many jobs where these capabilities are not heavily used. For example, many of the tasks a person performs in sales (digital or telephone), service, or document processing (such as accounts payable, accounting, or insurance claim disputes) require decision-making but do not require the ability to continuously learn. Companies have training programs for these activities, and in most cases they have many examples of good and bad work. Humans use these data sets for training, and soon these data sets will also be used to train artificial intelligence, allowing people to do this job more efficiently.

As computing power becomes cheaper and cheaper, GPT's ability to express ideas will become more and more like having a white-collar worker helping you with various tasks. Microsoft describes it as having a co-pilot. AI is fully integrated into products like Office and will enhance your work, such as helping write emails and manage your inbox.

Eventually, your primary way of controlling your computer will no longer be by pointing, clicking, or tapping through menus and dialog boxes. Instead, you will be able to write requests in plain English. (It’s not just English – AI will understand languages ​​from all over the world. In India earlier this year, I met some developers who were building AI that could understand many of the languages ​​spoken there.

Furthermore, advances in artificial intelligence will enable the creation of personal agents. Think of it like a digital personal assistant: It sees your latest emails, learns about meetings you're in, reads what you read, and reads what you don't want to interrupt. This can both improve your work on tasks you want to do and free you from tasks you don't want to do.

Advances in artificial intelligence will make it possible to create personal agents.

You'll be able to ask this agent to help you with scheduling, communications, and e-commerce using natural language, and it will work on all your devices. Creating personal agents is not yet feasible due to the cost of training models and running computations, but thanks to recent advances in artificial intelligence, it is now a realistic goal. Some questions need to be answered: For example, can an insurance company ask your agent for information about you without your permission? If so, how many people would choose not to use it?

Company-wide agency will empower employees in new ways. Agents who know the specific company will have direct access to its employees and should be present at each meeting so questions can be answered. You can tell it to be passive or encourage it to speak up if it has some insight. It will require access to sales, support, finance, product timelines, and text related to the company. It should read news relevant to the industry in which the company operates. I believe the result will be that employees will become more productive.

When productivity increases, society benefits because people are free to do other things, whether at work or at home. There are, of course, serious questions about what kind of support and retraining people need. Governments need to help workers transition into other roles. But the need for people who help others will never go away. The rise of artificial intelligence will free people to do things that software will never do—such as teaching, caring for the sick, and supporting the elderly.