Generative AI has caused a paradigm shift in the tech industry, with every major tech corporation, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, quickly hopping on the bandwagon with multi-billion-dollar investments.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been critical of the technology. Last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed that the philanthropic billionaire was against his $1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019. “You’re going to burn this billion dollars,” Gates warned.
More recently, the executive indicated that AI could be used as a bioterrorism weapon against the world if it landed in the wrong hands. In his annual letter titled “Optimism with footnotes,” Gates indicated that “of all the things humans have ever created, AI will change society the most.”
In 2015, I gave a TED talk warning that the world was not ready to handle a pandemic. If we had prepared properly for the COVID-19 pandemic, the amount of human suffering would have been dramatically less. Today, an even greater risk than a naturally caused pandemic is that a non-government group will use open source AI tools to design a bioterrorism weapon.
Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates.
While the technology shows great promise and advances across computing, education, medicine, and more, it also poses a significant threat to humanity. Last year, Google DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis, indicated AGI (artificial general intelligence) is coming but warned that society isn’t ready, further revealing that the prospects keep him up at night.
The executive highlighted the importance of having elaborate guardrails and regulations to govern the development and deployment of AI. He warned that there is no upper limit to how intelligent AI may become.
This news comes amid emerging reports suggesting that AI has hit a wall due to a lack of high-quality content for model training. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated that there’s no wall, which was corroborated by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who claimed that there’s no evidence scaling laws have begun to stop, the reports suggest that top AI research labs won’t be able to develop advanced AI models.
“I believe the advances will not plateau before exceeding human levels,” Gates indicated.
Bill Gates has also shared some interesting predictions about how AI could impact the job market. The executive indicated that the technology would replace humans for most things. But perhaps more interestingly, he indicated that we will still hold the power to decide what activities to preserve for humans exclusively. For instance, he joked that no one would like to watch computers playing baseball.
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