Bill Gates on ChatGPT and OpenAI "The Age of AI has begun"

Key Takeaways

it was stunning it was mind-blowing after the biology questions I had them typed in you know what do you say to a father with the sick child and it gave this very uh careful excellent answer that it was perhaps better than any of us in the room might have given and so I was like Wow uh what is it what is the scope of this thing because this is way better so Bill Gates decided to weigh in on this AI Revolution that's happening so today let's take a look at what he's writing and some of the most important things that he's saying about Ai and this new AI age that is beginning so he starts out saying that in his lifetime he's seen two demonstrations of technology that struck him as revolutionary and the first was the graphical user interface which sparked the whole personal computer Revolution and allowed millions and eventually billions of people to start using computers for personal and business tasks and the second thing that he's talking about is working with openai the founders of Chad gbt and Dolly he was involved with them in one way or another since 2016 way before most people even knew about this company existing in 2022 he gave him a challenge make this AI capable of answering questions that it hasn't been specifically trained for and as a subject matter he chose AP Bio a high school test for advanced placement the reason he did that is because the test was more than as he calls it simple regurgitation of scientific facts it asks you to think critically about biology if you can do that he said then you would have made a true breakthrough if you thought the challenge would keep him busy for two or three years they finished it in just a few months by the way gbt4 is placing in the high 90th percentile 96 Etc on Advanced placements for college for college readiness as well as some some of the advanced tasks that they give in colleges so it seems to be like it's progressed even more since middle of 2022. once that has aced a test they asked a non-scientific question what do you say to your father with a sick child and it wrote a thoughtful answer that was probably better than most of us in the room would have given which is kind of funny you can imagine a room a room full of nerds and Geeks that would probably have a hard time answering some of those questions but this AI no problem and he goes on to say something that really stuck out to me and it's that the development of AI is as fundamental a creation as the creation of the microprocessor the personal computer the internet and the mobile phone it will change the way people work learn travel how they get health care and communicate with each other entire Industries will reorient around it and business businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it how well they use AI I think what he's saying here saw a lot of very smart people involved in this field is that AI is a revolutionary technology and we're just at the very base of the Mountain of this massive wave that's coming and we're about to see a lot of things all over the world including business Healthcare pretty much anything you can think of be rapidly changed and affected by AI now some of the things that he talks about in his blog post is how this will affect the inequality around the globe and he does call for people to be aware of it and um we'll get to it at the end because he he does sort of say that um just if we let everything develop naturally it's likely that this will mainly benefit the the wealthy Nations and the wealthy people and it's unlikely to just by default really help the poorer nation that it's up to us to really make sure that this is sort of equally and distributed across rich and poor and this is where he says that the world needs to make sure that everyone and not just people who are well off benefit from AI he goes on to talk a little bit about what AI actually means versus a GI artificial general intelligence meaning some computer intelligence that's able equally able to do all tasks even things that is not necessarily trained to do he ends with something that I found very funny some of the pre-ai period will seem as distant as the days when using computerman typing the the C prompt rather than tapping a screen I don't remember those days when you had to change folders on computer MS-DOS by typing out these prompts on a computer and I realize now most people even my age or after just have no recollection of it and most likely in 20 years there's going to be a lot of people who can't even Envision how it is to operate computers and create things and write in art without using some sort of an AI assistant he's talking about the productivity enhancement that we'll have because of AI um he expects that we can train AIS to empower people to do more this work more patiently it will be almost as you having sort of this intern having a white color worker available to help you with various tasks and Microsoft describes this as having a co-pilot and they're going to start incorporating this into Microsoft Office which they're already doing they're relaunching things like the Microsoft designer they're already putting this into office Etc so he thinks of it as sort of creating a personal agent your very own assistant like a smart intelligent assistant that's going to take care of a lot of the busy work that can answer your phone calls emails they can schedule your doctor appointment they can pay the bills Etc next he's talking about health and how AI is going to completely change the healthcare industry one of the things that take up the most time for doctors at least here in America I'm sure probably most of the world is sort of like the busy work the paperwork filing insurance claims dealing with paperwork drafting notes from a doctor's visit all of that is going to be replaced by AI right now at hospitals and other places like that you have whole departments that just kind of go back and forth calling insurance claims in and filling out paperwork and stuff like that a lot of that can be replaced with AI there's no reason for a human sit there and hold and then basically convey some information that can be very easily done with these sort of programs in poorer countries he says how the doctors that are available be able to be more productive and reach more people it's going to be very effective to help a lot of the deaths that happen especially for young kids for example many people in those countries never get to see a doctor and AIS will help the health care workers that they do see for them to be more productive and then this next part is something that I've been talking about and something that I personally find completely fascinating and I think is going to be probably this might be the biggest breakthroughs that AIS will help us achieve and that's pointing that intelligence at developing new biotech breakthroughs so Bill Gates says AIS will dramatically accelerate the rate of medical breakthroughs now we've already seen that with things like deep mind and protein folding where it's able to predict the structure of proteins and proteins are of course are kind of like the little factories of Life they're like the they're these little systems that come together to produce Life as We Know It And it used to be incredibly difficult and very expensive to predict the structure of these proteins but with deep mind and AI it's faster much cheaper the first breakthrough recruit I believe in 2020 and since then it's just been accelerating and getting better the same thing can be done way of Designing certain medicines certain drugs the reality is the biological systems are so complicated humans we have a hard time understanding and dealing with words with AI this is what they put be really good at is sort of predicting how everything works and explaining back to us or at least showing us how stuff works I believe I remember reading how in order to sort of predict a how protein Falls it used to be once students whole PhD thesis and years of work and over a hundred thousand and various expenses to sort of complete that project to figure out how one protein is shaped whereas deep mind you know we feed all the data that we have into it and it starts predicting what those proteins look like it just spits them out and again this is brand new technology it's growing exponentially so we are likely to see our understanding of proteins for example uh grow exponentially and that's just the first thing that we found that we could use it for So eventually it could potentially be used for finding solutions to certain genetic diseases how to find cancers faster without needing invasive testing Etc and the next thing he talks about is education he says but I think in the next five ten years AI driven software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionizing the way people teach and learn they will know your interests and your learning style so that it can tailor content that will keep you engaged it will measure your understanding notice when you're losing interest and understand what kind of motivation you respond to it will give immediate feedback and then we get to the risks and problems with AI which of course this is a topic of deep debate right now because we don't know we can predict some of the risks that AI will have but it could be much bigger than we can even imagine right now so Bill Gates says super intelligent AIS are in our future compared to a computer our brains operate at a snail space an electrical signal in the brain moves at 1 100 000 the speed of the signal in a silicon chip so and once we develop AGI these strong AIS as they're known we'll probably be able to establish their own goals what will those goals be what happens if they conflict with Humanity's interests should we try to prevent strong AI from ever being developed these questions will get more pressing with time he also recommends a few books that are um that I've seen recommended by other people as well Bill Gates reads some in insane amount of books I think he just kind of like chews through them and so when he recommends three I think that's probably a good recommendation since he probably read everything there is to read on the subject and uh the ones that he recommends is super intelligence by Nick Bostrom which is one that keeps popping up all over the place he says I don't agree with everything the authors say and they don't agree with each other either but all three books are well written and not provoking talks about the next Frontiers he's talking about companies that are developing new chips that will provide the massive amounts of processing power needed for artificial intelligence Nvidia is making some exciting announcements in this field they do seem as one of the AI producing companies AI chip producing companies that's at the Forefront Forefront of all this there's a battle right now going on kind of between us and China in terms of who is able to produce and get the Hands-On these chips because both countries are trying to win the AI race and just recently in 2022 us did a lot of things to prevent China from getting their hands on a lot of these chips and that's why Taiwan is so important in all this because they do produce a very large portions of the US of the world supply of chips specifically these Advanced chips that are needed for AI development Bill Gates says some use Optical switches lasers essentially to reduce their energy consumption and lower the manufacturing costs ideally Innovative chips will allow you to run in an AI on your own device rather than in the cloud as you have to do today on the software side the AI Algos that drive and AI is learning will get better and better we've seen that with gpt3 gbt4 where we've seen that sort of exponential Improvement in how well they're able to communicate and what they can do and one interesting question he poses is are we going to see specialized AI like one for medicine one for Education one for you know some sort of a mathematical processing Etc or are we going to see sort of this artificial general intelligence that's able to learn and master any task and he proposes a couple things that we need to be thinking about as as a country as a nation as the human race right and the first is to balance the fears about the downsides of AI with the ability of it to improve human lives like we can't just be all doom and gloom and we can also be just absolutely positive we have to balance those two out there are dangers and there are incredible benefits and we have to be aware of both and second Market forces won't naturally produce any products and services that help the poorest so what he's saying is it just left to their own devices a lot of these companies will make life great for the richest the people in America Etc the people with money but they may not improve lives of people in the poorer nations of the world so we have to sort of keep that in mind and try to distribute some of those breakthroughs and some of that Newfound wealth across the globe and finally he says that we should keep in mind that we're only at the very beginning of what AI can accomplish now whatever limitations we see today will likely be gone by tomorrow she says I'm lucky to have been involved with the PC Revolution and the internet Revolution and he's seeing this as the next big thing and this is what I'm seeing as well the all the Computing things all the internet things the mobile stuff that happened over the last 20 30 years have completely changed the world and they've made Millionaires and billions billionaires in the process and what's coming now is sort of the next big thing and I think it's important like if this is something that you're interested in that you stay plugged in and you keep learning about this stuff because 10 20 years from now you're going to look back at this and say wow that was the biggest thing that ever happened to the human race and hopefully we're able to take advantage of it if you thought that was interesting click subscribe and I'll see you in the next one