Bill Gates Considers ChatGPT One of the Most Important Innovations Today

Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist who is connected to the Gates Foundation said in an interview published Friday that artificial intelligence is one of the "most important" innovations in the future.

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Gates said to the German-language publication Handelsblatt that the applications of generative AI, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, could improve office efficiency, as well as improving the ability to draft invoices and letters, according to Gates in a podcast conversations.

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“The problem with them today is that they demand too much computation, and they are not always accurate,” Gates said. “But even this week, you'll see Microsoft and Google announcing that they are competing for supremacy in this space.”

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Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that its Bing search engine will be powered in part by ChatGPT AI technology. Google also recently announced a search engine that is a competitor to ChatGPT called Bard.

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The co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, left his position as CEO in 2000 after leading the company for over two decades. Gates joked that he was biased as he remained a consultant to the company, which has a market cap of about $2 trillion.

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Gates said that the optimizations AI can offer for reading and writing will make a "tremendous difference." In the healthcare and education spaces, Gates added, AI is poised to enhance efficiency and meaningfully improve results.

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"AI has become very good at speech recognition and visual recognition, but they can't read," Gates explained. To put it another way, traditional AI platforms were unable to actually process the language that they were taking in. In contrast, newer platforms available on the market, like ChatGPT, have the capability to train, improve, and read and write based on new knowledge.

Gates pointed out that word processing and office tasks are the most effective applications for natural language platforms such as ChatGPT in the future.

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It is possible, Gates explained, to integrate the self-learning AI with Microsoft's Teams collaboration software, as an example, in which the A.I. would keep track of the conversation and produce relevant information based on what was discussed in the meeting.

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“We are going to make tremendous progress over the next few years to make these things even better,” Gates said.