The Age of AI has begun — Bill Gates

Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates believes that artificial intelligence (AI) is as revolutionary a technology as mobile phones, computers, and the Internet.
In an extensive opinion piece on his GatesNotes personal blog, Gates said AI would change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other.
“Entire industries will re-orient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it,” Gates said.
Gates believes that AI will not only help people be more productive in the workplace in general, but could reduce some of the world’s worst inequities — particularly in health, education, and climate change.
“For one thing, they’ll help healthcare workers make the most of their time by taking care of certain tasks for them — things like filing insurance claims, dealing with paperwork, and drafting notes from a doctor’s visit,” said Gates.
He said this would enable the limited number of healthcare workers in poorer countries to attend to more patients.
AI-powered machinery could also require less human intervention, making diagnoses faster.
Gates said he truly became aware of AI’s potential following a demonstration by OpenAI, the company behind the GPT language model.
During a meeting in 2022, he asked the OpenAI team to develop an AI that could pass an Advanced Placement (AP) biology exam.
While he expected it would take them two or three years, they managed the feat in just a few months.
“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,” Gates said.
An outside expert also gave GPT’s answers to six open-ended questions from the exam the highest possible score.
OpenAI has since published the test results of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in various exams and AP tests. These are shown in the chart below.
Gates said he was also stunned by GPT’s response to a non-scientific question after it was asked what it would say to a father with a sick child.
“It wrote a thoughtful answer that was probably better than most of us in the room would have given,” Gates said.
Gates said he knew he had just seen the most significant technological advance since the graphical user interface.
Nevertheless, Gates said people should keep in mind that AI was only at the beginning of what it could accomplish.
“Whatever limitations it has today will be gone before we know it,” Gates stated.
However, he cautioned that rules needed to be created to ensure the benefits of AI far outweighed its downsides so that everyone could enjoy its advantages, no matter where they lived or how much money they had.
“Governments and philanthropy will need to play a major role in ensuring that it reduces inequity and doesn’t contribute to it. This is the priority for my own work related to AI.”