Yahoo Finance Bill Gates: There will be AI that does 'everything that a human brain can'
Bill Gates suggests the revolution in artificial intelligence will be much bigger than the ChatGPT-like software from Microsoft and Salesforce.
True to form, Microsoft (MSFT) founder Bill Gates is already thinking about the next big thing in tech.
Think super AI — not just the run-of-the-mill AI sending all sorts of tech stocks through the roof in recent months.
"Superintelligent AIs are in our future," Gates said in a new post on his blog Tuesday. Gates believes people will see AI on par with the capabilities of a human brain 10 to 100 years from now.
"Compared to a computer, our brains operate at a snail’s pace: An electrical signal in the brain moves at 1/100,000th the speed of the signal in a silicon chip!" Gates explained. "Once developers can generalize a learning algorithm and run it at the speed of a computer — an accomplishment that could be a decade away or a century away — we’ll have an incredibly powerful AGI [artificial general intelligence]. It will be able to do everything that a human brain can, but without any practical limits on the size of its memory or the speed at which it operates. This will be a profound change."
To be sure, Microsoft is making a huge bet today that the future will be heavily reliant on AI.
In early February, Microsoft unveiled a new version of its Bing search engine that runs on a beefed-up version of OpenAI's ChatGPT natural language AI technology. Last week, Microsoft said it would add ChatGPT to its 365 suite of business software which includes Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
This comes after Microsoft unveiled a $10 billion investment in OpenAI in late January.
And Microsoft isn't alone in pushing the AI narrative with investors amid efforts to unlock greater tech spending among businesses and consumers.
Salesforce announced Einstein GPT this month, which it says is the world's first generative AI customer relationship management (CRM) technology. Salesforce said Einstein GPT can generate personalized emails for salespeople to fire off to customers and create specific responses for key customer questions. It will also be capable of auto-generating code for developers.
"With this next generation of generative AI, what it means is that AI is going to be able to do even more for you," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told Yahoo Finance Live (video above).
C3.ai (AI) also unveiled a new set of tools in late January to support generative AI for enterprise applications.
Gates wrote that new AI tools will go a long way to help improve learning and health care. At the same time, the tech pioneer stressed that there are risks associated with AI that governments and society at large will have to address.
"There’s the possibility that AIs will run out of control," Gates noted. "Could a machine decide that humans are a threat, conclude that its interests are different from ours, or simply stop caring about us? Possibly, but this problem is no more urgent today than it was before the AI developments of the past few months."
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn. Tips on the banking crisis? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com
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