Notes of “The Age of AI has begun”

On March 21, 2023, Bill Gates posted “The Age of AI has begun” months after the release of the possibly latest and definitely most popular ever Artificial Intelligence product, ChatGPT.

As a former CEO of Microsoft company, Bill still plays an important role in affecting some major businesses of this super corporation, and since Microsoft and OpenAI are at the center of this AI technology boom, it is more than necessary for us to learn how these companies tend to use the technologies they possess and how our life may be affected by them.

According to Mr. Gates’s article, contemporary artificial intelligence (AI)’s achievements are one of two technological revolutions he has seen so far, the other one is the graphical user interface (GUI). And he believes that AI can help “reduce some of the world’s worst inequities.” and be beneficial to human beings in multiple ways.

Productivity Enhancement

• The AI model can change our way of interacting with computing devices: no more clicking and tapping but just ask
• A personal agent: work across all devices to help you schedule, communicate and e-commerce
• Company-wide agent: provide insights for the company and make employee more productive

Health

• Help health-care workers make the most of their timeby taking care of filing insurance claims, dealing with paperwork …
• AIs give patients the ability to do basic triage, get advice about how to deal with health problems, and decide whether they need to seek treatment.
• Accelerate the rate of medical breakthroughs
• Predict side effects and figure out dosing levels

Education

• Measure your understanding, notice when you’re losing interest, and understand what kind of motivation you respond to. It will give immediate feedback.
• Assist teachers and administrators, including assessing a student’s understanding of a subject and giving advice on career planning.
• Need to be trained on diverse data sets so they are unbiased and reflect the different cultures where they’ll be used.

Risks and Problems with AI

• Not good at understanding the context of a human’s request
• Struggle with abstract reasoning
• AI can be used for good purposes or malign ones and runs out of control

Frontiers

• Innovative chips will allow you to run an AI on your own device, rather than in the cloud
• Three principles should guide the public conversation about AI technology:
  • Guard against the risks and spread the benefits to as many people as possible
  • Ensure that AIs are used to reduce inequity
  • Whatever limitations AI has today will be gone before we know it

Now, new tools like Copilot is embedded into some of the most successful software of Microsoft and is enabling programmers and Office user to be much more efficient. It seems that the age of AI is begun, yet, whether such age is benign for everyone still requires further experimentation and investigation.