“The AIs will get to that ability, to be as good a tutor as any human ever could.”
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It appears that one of the world’s foremost tech billionaires is going all in on artificial intelligence.
As CNBC reports, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates predicted that during the next few years, AIs will “be as good a tutor as any human ever could.”
“At first, we’ll be most stunned by how it helps with reading — being a reading research assistant — and giving you feedback on writing,” he told a crowd during his keynote speech at a digital learning conference in San Diego last week.
“If you just took the next 18 months, the AIs will come in as a teacher’s aide and give feedback on writing,” he continued. “And then they will amp up what we’re able to do in math.”
Bill & AI 4Eva
It’s far from the first time that Gates has voiced his excitement over the tech.
Just last month, Gates wrote on his blog that “the age of AI has begun,” called OpenAI’s GPT large language model “revolutionary,” and predicted that “whatever limitations [AI] has today will be gone before we know it.”
Nearly two decades before OpenAI released its blockbuster AI chatbot and scored a lucrative Microsoft deal, Gates talked up the then-futuristic-sounding field of machine learning to the New York Times.
“If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, so machines can learn, that is worth ten Microsofts,” he told the paper back in 2004.
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Then in 2019, Gates invested in the startup Luminous, which is building a light-based AI accelerator chip that will purportedly power the supercomputers necessary to sustain the AIs of the future.
If his comments in recent months are any indication, it’s clear that Gates believes we really are on the precipice of a true quantum leap in AI tech — and while he feels like the outlook is rosy, it’s hard to say whether or not we agree with him.
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