Bill Gates says the AI revolution is as fundamental as 'the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone'
Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates has published a new blog post called The Age of AI Has Begun(opens in new tab), in which he describes some of his own experiences using the technology and theorises about where this is all potentially going. No-one can predict the future, of course, but among all the questions raised by AI, Gates is crystal clear on how seismic a technological advance this is: «The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone.»
There are two times in his life, Gates says, when he's seen technology demonstrations that struck him as revolutionary. The first time was 1980, when he saw a graphical user interface. «The forerunner of every modern operating system, including Windows,» said Gates. «I sat with the person who had shown me the demo, a brilliant programmer named Charles Simonyi, and we immediately started brainstorming about all the things we could do with such a user-friendly approach to computing.»
The second revolutionary demonstration was a biology exam. Gates begins by describing a challenge he set OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, mid-2022: to train an artificial intelligence to pass an Advanced Placement biology exam. The AP biology exam, Gates explains, is not just about reproducing a bunch of scientific facts, but synthesising them and thinking critically about the questions being asked. He expected the challenge to take a few years. Within a few months the OpenAI team returned and, as Gates watched, this thing took AP biology and answered 59/60 questions correctly, as well as writing six longer form answers.
The AI's test was graded by an external expert as a 5, the highest possible
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