Bill Gates has called artificial intelligence as revolutionary as the Internet on the eve of Google’s launch of chatbot ChatGPT rival Bard.
ChatGPT, in which Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is a cornerstone investor, was made available to public users in November.
Google launched its chatbot offering Bard yesterday, which will compete against ChatGPT. Both platforms currently operate for free.
The pre-existing ChatGPT bot was developed by OpenAI—a brainchild of serial tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel.
Microsoft, which Gates co-founded, invested $10bn in ChatGPT this January.
Gates said on his blog that he has met with the team from OpenAI since 2016 and “was impressed by their steady progress”.
He described giving the founders of the ChatGPT app a challenge to train AI to pass an advanced biology exam, “answering questions that it hasn’t been specifically trained for” and said they had passed in just a few months.
Next revolution in tech
In a blog post on GatesNotes yesterday, Gates hailed AI as a panacea for business sales, healthcare, education and even climate change.
AI is the next stage following the PC revolution and the Internet revolution, Gates said, stating that he was “lucky to have been involved” with both.
Yet he also noted a pertinent warning: “AIs also make factual mistakes”.
“It raises hard questions about the workforce, the legal system, privacy, bias, and more,” said Gates.
Gates also said AI experiences “hallucinations”, the latter description being one of several comparisons he made between artificial and human intelligence.
“Superintelligent AIs are in our future. Compared to a computer, our brains operate at a snail’s pace: An electrical signal in the brain moves at 1/100,000th the speed of the signal in a silicon chip!” Gates said in the blog post.
“It will be able to do everything that a human brain can, but without any practical limits on the size of its memory or the speed at which it operates. This will be a profound change.”