Bill Gates is very good at predicting the future. Even if later it's not as he thought. In 2001 it introduced the Tablet PC, but it was the iPad that succeeded in 2011. A similar thing happened to the mobile phone and smart watches. He saw what was coming, but things didn't happen according to his vision. Now he has just predicted technological transformations with the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI): Amazon and Google searches have, from his point of view, their days numbered.
The Microsoft co-founder attended an event by investment firms Goldman Sachs and SV Angel in San Francisco on Monday evening where he explained that he hopes artificial intelligence will see tech companies develop multitasking personal assistants for human beings: "Whoever wins the personal agent, that's going to be the biggest, because you'll never go to a search site again, you'll never go to a productivity site again, you'll never go to Amazon again."
Gates' idea is that each of us has an artificial intelligence assistant who is able to understand our needs and who knows our habits perfectly to anticipate what we need. One of the examples may be controversial, because, according to the philanthropist, it will be able to help him with activities such as "reading the things you don't have time to read".
Among the winners of this race for digital butler, Bill Gates sees Microsoft, which, after a heavy investment in OpenAI ($13 billion), has integrated ChatGPT's language model into its Bing search engine with the intention of make direct competition to Google. "I was disappointed that Microsoft didn't enter - said Gates - but I'm impressed with a couple of startups".
Among the emerging companies, Gates mentioned Inflection, which has among its founders Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, which aims to "make personal artificial intelligence for every person in the world". It is the same concept of assistant.
Programming, creating tourist itineraries or writing long papers. Instead, he can hold long conversations with a "kind and empathetic" style. Suleyman sets out to "design an AI that helps you articulate your intentions, organize your life and support you when you need it".
Gates expressed the conviction that future humanoid robots, due to their low costs compared to humans, will largely affect the jobs of millions of "white-collar" workers, an English expression to refer to staff who work in offices. When we invent these robots, we'll have to make sure they don't get Alzheimer's," he added jokingly.
