That AI is making headlines is no surprise. Without going any further, not even 24 hours ago Microsoft announced a full integration of ChatGPT with Bing and the Microsoft Edge browser. And in fact, we’re going to stay with this company, as the protagonist of this piece is none other than Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft.
The technology tycoon stepped down from the company’s board of directors in 2020. However, he continues to keep an eye on all the news concerning his son. In statements collected by Forbes, who have had the opportunity to chat with him, Gates is very clear: “AI will be the hottest topic of 2023”. Just like that.
Getting down to business, Bill Gates points out that “it’s a lot of fun to play with these things”, although this does not mean that “it’s going to change the labor market and make us wonder what the limits are”. He notes, however, that this will happen “in five or ten years”.
“When you’re with a group of friends and you want to write a poem about how fun something has been. The fact that you can say, ‘Okay, write it like Shakespeare, and it does, that creativity has been fun to have,” he qualifies. “I’m always surprised that, even though the reason I have access is for serious purposes, I often turn to [ChatGPT] just for fun. And after reciting a poem he’s written, I have to admit that I couldn’t have written it myself.”
Continuing with ChatGPT, Gates points out that the system is “really imperfect” and also “not very intuitive” to use. “And then, with something like math, it gets it completely wrong,” he stresses. “Before we trained him, his confidence in a wrong answer was also mind-boggling. We had to train him to do Sudoku, and he’d get it wrong and say, ‘Oh, I wrote wrong. Well, of course you misspelled, what does that mean, you don’t have a keyboard, you don’t have fingers! But you’re ‘misspelling’? Wow. But that’s what the [training text] corpus had taught him,” he says.
While we are still waiting for news about what Google is doing in this regard to really stand up to Bing, it is time to follow Microsoft’s updates with OpenAI.
