In 2014, a series of scientists and personalities from the world of technology came together to create an association called Future of Life. His mission was none other than the defense of a responsible development of artificial intelligence.
Among its members was a Bill Gates which said that in a few decades “AIs will be strong enough to become a concern”. The human race was threatened, he told us, but since then his speech has changed a lot.
The Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist’s comments rarely fall on deaf ears, and he has always had a special interest in robotics and artificial intelligence. The rise of robotics in 2017 caused him to make a striking statement that “if a robot replaces a human’s work, this robot must pay taxes like a human.”
In the past he has also spoken about the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs, but now with a much more positive tone towards a technology that has been especially promising for him. He said that if he could go back in time, he would found an artificial intelligence company.
This interest in this discipline has been confirmed once again with the appearance of ChatGPT, the phenomenon that has already conquered 100 million users and that poses a huge revolution in various sectors.
In an interview in Forbes, Gates declared that “artificial intelligence is going to be a candidate for the hottest topic of 2023. And you know what? It deserves it.” The famous businessman went further, and explained that for him “this is as important as the PC or the internet was“.
It’s significant that this is coming from someone who was most responsible for the rise of the PC, and who also spurred Internet adoption with the inclusion of Internet Explorer and Internet connection tools in Windows 95.
There is nonetheless something surprising about Gates’s stance, especially when we consider Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI. According to The Information (paywall), Bill Gates I had doubts about the company when in 2019 Redmond invested a billion dollars in it.
In fact, he expressed the importance of analyzing OpenAI technology prior to investment, and he was not clear that artificial intelligence could understand and contextualize the human way of speaking. Those fears were unfounded: OpenAI has shown that ChatGPT is quite capable of all of this.
Image: Global Panorama
