Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, predicts that the leading artificial intelligence firm of the future will have developed a personal digital agent that can carry out certain tasks on behalf of its users.
The technology will be so advanced that it may drastically change how users behave.
“Whoever wins the personal agent, that’s the big thing, because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you’ll never go to Amazon again,” he said.
As he spoke on artificial intelligence on Monday at a Goldman Sachs and SV Angel event in San Francisco, Bill Gates stated that this yet-to-be developed AI assistant will be able to comprehend a person’s requirements and habits and will assist them in “reading the stuff you don’t have time to read.”
According to Gates, there is a 50/50 probability that the future AI winner will be a tech giant or a startup.
“I’d be disappointed if Microsoft didn’t come in there,” Gates said. “But I’m impressed with a couple of startups, including Inflection,” he added referring to Inflection.AI, co-founded by former DeepMind executive Mustafa Suleyman.
According to Gates, it will be some time before this potent future digital agent is available for widespread usage. Companies will continue integrating so-called generative AI technologies like OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT into their own products up to that point.
As part of his discussion on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s health initiatives, Gates asserted that AI will hasten developments in the field and result in more advanced drug development.
The co-founder of Microsoft thinks that despite the fact that scientists still don’t fully understand how the human brain functions, we are near to developing effective medications to treat conditions like Alzheimer’s, with human trials for the new medications perhaps beginning in ten years.
He also compared the advent of text-generating AI technology to a game-changer that will have an impact on white-collar professionals.
Gates continued by saying that he thinks blue-collar workers will also be significantly impacted by future humanoid robots that are less expensive for businesses to deploy than human labor.
