NDTV Exclusive: Did Bill Gates In 70s Visualise An Era Of AI In Future? What He Said

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist, Bill Gates, in a conversation with NDTV, talked about his journey from a Harvard student to building Microsoft, the growth of AI and his book, 'Source Code: My Beginnings', a memoir and story of Mr Gates.

Mr Gates spoke in detail on Artificial Intelligence, its future and how India is using the technology in the healthcare, and agriculture sectors. To a question on whether in the 1970s he visualised an era of AI in the future, the Microsoft co-founder said "Yes...and AI has always been the obsession and it's really happening."

"Yes, the question of what software does that humans can't and what can humans do that software can't, has been asked. Anybody who worked on this stuff, even before I was born, Alan Turing, raised the question of whether computers can fool humans by talking in a very deep way. So this idea of...Can you translate? Can you look at a picture and recognise it? Can you listen to a stream of speech and recognise it? There were lots of people working on that but the progress was embarrassingly slow until about 12 years ago," Mr Gates said.

"When the scale of computation allowed people to bring this, we started seeing some progress than what was expected, but then we still didn't have reading and writing... When I finally see GPT-4, I'm just blown away because I've been thinking, hey, it's still going to take a while... So AI, you know, has always been the obsession and now it's really happening," he added.

He also spoke about what worries him about AI: "There's no upper bound to how good AI can get. And so AI is both extremely promising to help us in education and healthcare and scientific discovery. I mean, it's mind-blowing how good it's going to be and how it's going to help us. But that is also scary because since it's happening very quickly, you know, within one generation, and we don't think there's any upper limit. Now people look at it today and say, yes, some of the things that does are very clever, but isn't it still sometimes also very stupid?"

"...I am concerned that AI, even though it lets us do so much more, we're going to have to take and shape it in a positive way. Make sure that criminals aren't using it or how, you know, make sure it doesn't get used in weapons in a way that triggers wars. This is a, you know, a tricky piece of technology, even though, you know, there's no stopping it," he added.