I don’t typically think of Bill Gates as someone prone to making hyperbolic claims. His recent assertion that “artificial intelligence is as revolutionary as mobile phones and the Internet” is all the more arresting for that very reason.
In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary.
The first time was in 1980, when I was introduced to a graphical user interface.
The second big surprise came just last year. I’d been meeting with the team from OpenAI since 2016 and was impressed by their steady progress. In mid-2022, I was so excited about their work that I gave them a challenge: train an artificial intelligence to pass an Advanced Placement biology exam. Make it capable of answering questions that it hasn’t been specifically trained for… If you can do that, I said, then you’ll have made a true breakthrough.
In September, when I met with them again, I watched in awe as they asked GPT, their AI model, 60 multiple-choice questions from the AP Bio exam—and it got 59 of them right. Then it wrote outstanding answers to six open-ended questions from the exam. We had an outside expert score the test, and GPT got a 5—the highest possible score…
I knew I had just seen the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface.