This is ‘the most profound advance in technology ever,’ according to Bill Gates

This is ‘the most profound advance in technology ever,’ according to Bill Gates

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Bill Gates, speaking at the CNN Academy in Abu Dhabi, discussed the rapid evolution of AI, emphasizing its transformative potential and societal implications. Reflecting on AI’s journey, he highlighted breakthroughs like GPT-4, which surpassed expectations in reading and writing capabilities. Gates stressed the need to ensure AI benefits reach under-resourced regions, particularly in healthcare, through affordable diagnostics, cloud computing, and language support. He underscored AI’s role in drug discovery, especially for diseases like malaria, where innovation could save millions of lives. Addressing AI’s energy demands, Gates advocated for sustainable solutions like solar, wind, and nuclear power, while acknowledging the need for a balanced energy transition. He remains optimistic about AI’s ability to tackle global challenges responsibly.

📜 Full Transcript

Bill Gates certainly needs no introduction, especially to the 50 students in the audience who are enrolled in our CNN Academy in Abu Dhabi. Today, these aspiring journalists are interviewing this world leading technologist and philanthropist, for his insights on how artificial intelligence can tackle major global challenges ahead of the CNN Academy Masterclass. We asked all students here to submit questions to you. One of the most consistent questions that we received was this With your decades at the forefront of technological transformation, how surprised are you by the rapid development of A.I. at this point? And so many people have asked us about where you stand on the threats and opportunities of AI’s growth. Let’s start there. Well, the dream of AI goes back to even before I was born, you know, Alan Turing, you know, raised the question, would there ever be computers that you wouldn’t even know whether you were talking to a human or a computer? And for a long time, I couldn’t even do basic things like visual recognition and speech recognition. And as we scaled up and used these neural net techniques one by one, we solved different problems. You know,
the computer got better at recognizing speech, got better at vision, really matching human performance in sensory areas. But the threshold we had not crossed that I often raised was it essentially couldn’t read and it couldn’t write it. You know,
reading means encoding the knowledge in a large body of text in a way that you could access it, say passing a medical test is a great benchmark of that. And that’s where Chat GPT four from Openai just a little bit over two years ago really took that unsolved problem and said, Wow, this technique actually can give is pretty phenomenal results there. And in these two years, not only is open, AI dramatically improved their models, but you have many others. So yes, I always expected this to happen, but it was going the hardest problem, we were sure. And then all of a sudden we had the breakthrough and now we’re having some additional breakthroughs, what we call metacognition. And so it’s it’s the most profound advance in technology ever. Bill has been an outspoken advocate of A.I. on CNN and of Leilani is in the audience. Please stand up. And what’s your question? As A.I. reshapes industries and economies, what steps are needed to be taken to ensure that under-resourced regions are able to also benefit, especially in health care, where that digital infrastructure may be just isn’t quite there. Typically, big advances become available to the rich countries, and then it’s often a generation or more greater than 20 years before they’re widely available in middle income and low income areas. And if we’re not careful, that’s the same thing would happen here, because although the basic interface, you know, we can teach these kids all human languages, not just written, but also speech in and speech out. So gathering the data for all the languages the world, including the case, the Gates Foundation, the African languages that’s going on. And so will will at least have that part will essentially be solved. Getting the cloud computing resources that these intelligence services require available to those countries. There’s a lot of great discussion about that in health. Now, things like diagnosis sticks. A lot of those tools are getting cheap enough that we can give those out, even some diagnostics. You can use the camera on the phone or some simple out on, you know, we’re trying to make ultrasound very cheap. We have now thing where you say, I wear a pregnant woman can be scanned and told, okay, your pregnancy will be a risky pregnancy. So you ought to go to where C-sections available or no. You know
it looks like it’s going to be fine And that would that alone would have a dramatic benefit. So only by consciously coming up with the right data, supporting their languages, working with their regulatory apparatus to get comfortable, and then having essentially donations of some percentage, even, you know, 4% of the the cloud capacity would cover these these pretty basic things. So I think we can make this an exception and and get it out there almost at the same time, beyond investing in this portable ultrasound from the Butterfly network, the Gates Foundation has committed an annual sum of $370 million from 2023 to 2027 to support innovative solutions for maternal, newborn and child health on a broader basis. Where do you see or what are you most focused on with regard AI and drug discovery? There’s many of the world’s diseases Take malaria or tuberculous. This is an example where the people who suffer are rich enough to command the attention in the marketplace. And so, you know, even though to this day, over 600,000 kids die every year, you know, 600,000 of the 5 million kids who die under the age of five die because of malaria. And yet, you know, malaria research, you know, is is tiny. We’re by far the biggest in that. And so now we’re using a I you know, we’re coming up with new drugs, a new vaccine, also a genetic way of killing, massively killing mosquitoes, so called gene drive, which mean the infection rate goes down. And give us a chance as all these tools come together to actually eradicate malaria. As optimistic as you’ve ever been about the eradication of malaria at this point, then? Well, in terms of the upstream work, that tool discovery in the great part of filmmaking there. Yes, that that is fantastic. The world that we’re delivering these tools into, you know, instability in the Sahel, the distraction of, you know, terrible things in Sudan cause Ukraine. This is a world with a lot of tumultuous things. And it means that the basic needs of the poorest countries, including in Africa, sort of we get distracted, the budgets go to the military, to the refugees, to, you know, a wide variety of things. And many of those that we are talking about affected by, for example, malaria are in some of the poorest countries in the poorest parts of the world, which are climate inflicted. I mean, very specifically, if not conflict, then climate North times conflict and climate at the same time and climate came up. And so many of the questions that our students had for you, how can we harness AI in the fight to preserve the planet whilst also being aware of the massive appetite of course, the AI has for energy? How do you balance those? Actually, high is small compared to electrifying cars, electrifying trucks and busses and taking industrial processes like steel or cement and having electricity rather than direct hydrocarbon usage Be a key input to those. But I will add significant electricity demand. Now, fortunately, the companies that are involved in building these data centers don’t want to add to climate problems, and so they’re very desirous to find either nuclear fission or fusion or wind or solar type approaches. And so they’ll be willing to invest and pay a little bit above, say, the natural gas price of electricity and drive some of these technologies down to be less and less expensive. And the appetite, of course, for that energy will be sooner than that. Oh, absolutely. In the near term, we have to build a lot of solar, unfortunately, probably some additional natural gas to to meet these the demands over the next six years. And you have said and you’ve been consistent about this, that there will be a mix of energy provision and that will include traditional fossil fuels for a period of time. Correct. And anyone who thinks we can make an abrupt transition just isn’t being realistic. You know, we need to make nuclear a lot less expensive and we need to explore ways that you can take things like natural gas and use it without any leakage and, you know, potentially even ways of using it. So there’s no carbon dioxide.