Bill Gates calls AI the most important innovation of our era

Advances in artificial intelligence are the most important innovation at the moment. Billionaire and Microsoft founder Bill Gates said this in an interview with Handelsblatt.

The businessman compared the emergence of generative AI to the invention of the internet.

“This will change our world. Generative AI applications, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can boost office efficiency, invoicing, and drafting letters,” he says.

According to the entrepreneur, previously natural-language processing systems did not perceive the information they received.

“The simplest way to understand this is that AI is very good at recognizing speech and text, but basically cannot read,” Gates said.

But modern language models like ChatGPT are capable of learning, improving, and reading and writing with new knowledge.

Gates believes that the capabilities of generative AI will have a “huge impact” on many sectors of the economy. In healthcare and education, the algorithms could noticeably boost efficiency and substantially improve outcomes, he says.

He also pointed to text-processing and office-task applications as the optimal future use for language models. As an example, he pointed to a hypothetical integration with the corporate messenger Microsoft Teams and noted that AI could track the conversation to retrieve relevant information based on the meeting.

“We will have to work less,” Gates said.

However, the billionaire noted that such algorithms are not always accurate and require enormous computing power. But this does not prevent companies like Microsoft and Google from competing for leadership in the field, he added.

“Progress in the coming couple of years, aimed at making the technologies even better, will be significant,” Gates said.

In February, Google introduced the Bard chatbot, which it plans to integrate into its search service.

The next day, Microsoft announced adding ChatGPT to Bing.