Bill Gates has never been so excited.
The co-founder of software giant Microsoft is on the artificial intelligence bandwagon that has become the buzzword in the tech world in recent weeks.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla (TSLA) and founder of SpaceX, even declared that 2023 is going to be a "big year" for AI.
For all tech luminaries, AI is the new technological revolution, which made a major public breakthrough in November with the launch of the chatbot ChatGPT. This chatbot is different from previous bots in that it is possible to get exact answers to complex questions quickly. It can respond to queries with human-like responses.
'This Will Change Our World'
Unlike recent technologies announced as revolutionary, consumers have been able to test the uses of ChatGPT in their daily life. The conversational robot has indeed been made available to the general public by OpenAI, the company that developed it.
Impressed, many companies promise to integrate its various features. Microsoft (MSFT), one of the big investors in OpenAI, has just announced that it will incorporate ChatGPT features into its Bing search engine and will also integrate it into its business services.
Google, whose core business is threatened by ChatGPT, has announced the upcoming launch of Bard, presented as a direct rival to ChatGPT.
Gates is full of praise.
"Until now, artificial intelligence could read and write, but could not understand the content," the billionaire told German newspaper Handelsblatt during an interview on Feb. 10. "The new programs like ChatGPT will make many office jobs more efficient by helping to write invoices or letters. This will change our world."
ChatGPT will improve office efficiency, drafting invoices and letters, Gates said. He sees many possibilities for the next generation of chatbots, including in the health care and education spaces.
"The easiest way to understand it is that AI has got very good at speech recognition and visual recognition, but they essentially couldn’t read,” he praised.
Gates, who cofounded Microsoft in 1975, believes that new robots like ChatGPT are capable of training, improving, and reading and writing through new knowledge. He said that AI will improve messaging software like Microsoft's Team. AI would, for example, be able to keep track of the conversation to produce relevant information based on a meeting.
"The progress over the next couple of years to make these things even better will be profound,” Gates told the German newspaper.
'Important as the PC, as the Internet'
This isn't the first time Gates has praised AI.
"AI is going to be debated as the hottest topic of 2023. And you know what? That's appropriate." Gates said in a Forbes interview earlier this month. "This is every bit as important as the PC, as the internet."
In a little over two months, ChatGPT has shown the future of search engines: shorter, more concise results, and exact answers to the questions people ask, instead of the current collection of links. Up to now, a user has had to scan the links and click on the ones that most likely would answer the question posed.
The new AI-powered search engines are also more humanlike enabling conversational interaction with the user. This significantly reduces the time required for a search, increasing efficiency.
ChatGPT -- the name stands for generative pretrained transformer -- is an artificial intelligence chatbot service run by a nonprofit research organization called OpenAI. It was created as a democratized artificial intelligence service and has virtually limitless possibilities for productivity -- and for error.
What is innovative is the fact that this artificial-intelligence interface is perfectly at ease in a conversational mode: You can ask a lot of questions one after the other and expect clear answers. It is a generalist robot: You can ask ChatGPT to write a film script, the plan for a thesis, or a computer code.
One of ChatGPT's skills is its ability to break down a complex task into several small elementary tasks, as a computer program would do, to facilitate solutions for human users.
