Bill Gates believes there will come a time when artificial intelligence is smart enough to teach schoolchildren and knowledgeable enough to treat the sick.
The founder and longtime leader of Microsoft is considered one of the grandfathers of modern computing, and recent advances in AI development has him pondering what humans’ lives might be like in a not-so-distant future dominated by machines.
Gates made his frightening predictions about an AI-led world during an appearance on the Tuesday edition of Jimmy Fallon’s late night talk show.
‘The era that we’re just starting is that intelligence is rare, you know, a great doctor, a great teacher,’ Gates said. ‘And with AI, over the next decade, that will become free and commonplace. Great medical advice, great tutoring.’
‘And it’s profound because it solves all these specific problems, like we don’t have enough doctors or mental health professionals, but it brings with it so much change.’
Gates questioned whether people will even have to work the traditional five-day, 40-hour work week that’s been the norm in America since the late 1930s.
‘Should we just work two or three days a week?’ he asked. ‘So I love the way it’ll drive innovation forward, but I think it’s a little bit unknown if we’ll be able to shape it. And so, legitimately, people are like “wow, this is a bit scary.” It’s completely new territory.’
Gates is aware of AI’s potential to usurp the human race more than most, as he signed an open letter in 2023 that claimed AI is a societal-scale risk on the level of pandemics and nuclear war.
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, said on Jimmy Fallon’s late night show that AI will eventually be smart enough to be stand-ins for doctors and teachers
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, said on Jimmy Fallon’s late night show that AI will eventually be smart enough to be stand-ins for doctors and teachers
Fallon reacts with shock after Gates tells him humans won’t be needed ‘for most things’ when AI advances past a certain point
Other prominent signatories from the AI industry included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.
Fallon then asked the question that was likely on everyone’s mind: ‘I mean, will we still need humans?’
‘Uh, not for most things,’ Gates said, prompting Fallon to put his hands up to his mouth in shock.
‘Really?!’ Fallon said.
‘Well, we’ll decide. You know, baseball. We won’t want to watch computers play baseball,’ Gates said. ‘There will be some things we’ll reserve for ourselves.’
Miquel Noguer Alonso, the founder of the Artificial Intelligence Finance Institute, shared a very similar sentiment to Gates in an interview with DailyMail.com.
‘What is fun is to have two humans playing chess, or two humans playing football or baseball,’ said Alonso, a professor at Columbia University’s engineering department.
But in Gates’ estimation, AI will increasingly be used to increase productivity to heights that were once thought to be impossible.
‘In terms of making things and moving things and growing food, over time those will basically be solved problems,’ he said.
There has not yet been a clear push from governments around the world to regulate AI or the negative consequences it could bring, like eliminating entire industries and putting millions out of work.
The closest humanity has come to addressing the dangers of AI is through an annual summit that’s been going on since 2023.
These meetings are attended by heads of state and executives at major companies, who discuss things like global AI governance and how human employment will shift in an AI-dominated world.
The next gathering, dubbed the AI Action Summit, will be held in Paris on February 10 and 11.
All three of these men, considered titans in the artificial intelligence industry, signed the 2023 Statement on AI Risk, acknowledging the technology’s potential for destruction
Much of the attention on AI development in recent weeks is thanks to DeepSeek, a Chinese AI chatbot that can outperform some of its best competitors, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1.
Based on disclosures from DeepSeek, the company spent two months and $5.6 million to develop the large language model that undergirds its chatbot.
To put that in perspective, it took OpenAI seven years from its founding in 2015 to release the first version of ChatGPT.
And Altman, who cofounded OpenAI along with Elon Musk and many others, has said that it cost more than $100 million to train GPT-4. That’s 17 times what DeepSeek claimed to have spent.
DeepSeek also destroyed the long-held mantra from executives and investors that amassing the greatest number of costly, advanced computer chips to build your AI model would automatically make it the best.
In a research paper, DeepSeek said it trained its V3 chatbot in just two months with a little more than 2,000 Nvidia H800 GPUs, chips designed to comply with export restrictions the US placed on China in 2022.
By comparison, Musk’s xAI is running 100,000 of Nvidia’s more advanced H100s at a computing cluster in Tennessee. These chips usually retail for $30,000 each.
This revelation that there might be a future in which fewer Nvidia chips will be needed tanked Nvidia shares more than 17 percent in a single trading session.
The AI industry is incredibly fast-moving, much like the tech industry, but even faster. Because of that, Alonso told DailyMail.com the biggest players in AI right now are not guaranteed to stay dominant, especially if they don’t constantly innovate.
*Culled from DailyMail.com.
