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Bill Gates hails ‘stunning’ AI progress, urges focus on global equality
The Microsoft co-founder underscored AI’s transformative potential in healthcare, education and agriculture while highlighting the need to ensure its benefits reach lower-income nations
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and chair of the Gates Foundation, has described the recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) as “stunning”, pointing to its potential to improve healthcare, education and agriculture.
Speaking during a fireside chat with Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) chairman Russell Tham at the ATxInspire event in Singapore, Gates also underscored the hurdles in ensuring AI benefits all of humanity, especially those in lower-income countries.
Gates revealed his long-standing fascination with AI, dating back to his student days, when he was figuring out, among other things, how to programme computers to read a biology textbook and then take the Advanced Placement (AP) exam for US high school students.
“What data structures would you create in order to encode the knowledge in that book to allow you to beat any student who reads that book? That remained an unsolved problem until GPT-4 came along,” he said.
To that, Gates recounted challenging OpenAI a few years ago. “My challenge to my friends at OpenAI was, I’m working on malaria and tuberculosis, and if you guys can pass the AP exam, come and tell me,” he said.
Gates was surprised when, within eight months, OpenAI showed him a system that passed the test. “The night I saw it, we asked it about 20 questions and it got 19 right,” he said, adding that the only wrong answer came about because the single-pass algorithm used at the time could not solve a question that involved some use of math.
But now that’s all completely solved, said Gates, and the pace of development continues to astound him. “The progress since then is quite stunning,” he said, adding that he uses AI research tools multiple times a day.
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Gates also drew a parallel between the current AI revolution and the shift from scarce, expensive computing to essentially free computing power that he witnessed at Microsoft. While intelligence about tough problems remains scarce today, he expects that over the next decade, intelligence of all types, including physical robotic capabilities, will be largely free. “It’s hard to overstate how profound that is,” said Gates.
A significant portion of the discussion focused on leveraging AI to address global inequalities, a core mission of the Gates Foundation that focuses on funding the use of AI in healthcare, education and agriculture, particularly in lower-income countries.
For example, Gates noted that in Africa, feature phones, for which the “cost of computation and intelligence will be very small”, can provide access to healthcare resources for those who “never get to see a real doctor”.
“We’ll be able to create, using AI, a doctor for everyone in Africa, an advisor to farmers, a tutor for students, and we’ll make sure that happens in poor countries as fast or faster than it happens in the rest of the world,” he said.
Philanthropic support
However, Gates noted that these initiatives will require philanthropic support as big tech companies would not prioritise them in terms of getting the required datasets as well as deploying and training the AI models.
Responding to a question from the audience about bottlenecks in applying AI to drug discovery, Gates noted that while AI excels at understanding chemical and protein shapes, regulatory processes can be a potential chokepoint.
“If you’re discovering drugs in six months, but it takes five years to get approval, you can’t make that kind of dramatic change. The question is, how do we get these AI systems into the regulator?”, he said, adding that the Gates Foundation has funded projects to apply the use of AI in drug safety so that regulatory process can also proceed at the speed of AI.
On the broader topic of innovation, Gates reflected on his experiences at Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, underscoring the importance of tackling audacious goals where market failures exist, citing his work on malaria. “I wish I had competition in malaria and malnutrition, but I have essentially no competition,” he said. “It’s a strange world, but it also keeps you on your toes, because if we make a mistake or pick a wrong strategy, we could kill people.”
For aspiring entrepreneurs, particularly those looking at AI, Gates advised them to find a niche. “You have to be a little bit of a contrarian and pick something that other people don’t see,” he said.
Gates also noted the high quality of open-source AI models, and urged people to tinker with them, especially smaller ones that use distillation techniques to achieve the performance of larger models.
Reflecting on leadership, especially amid rapid technological change and geopolitical fragmentation, he called for greater global cooperation, expressing concern over political polarisation and the potential for misuse of powerful technologies like AI and biotechnology. “Cooperation is what’s going to make the difference between whether we handle this well or not,” said Gates.
