Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft MSFT, is thinking about the next big thing in tech.
Think super AI, not just the run-of-the-mill AI that sent all kinds of tech stocks through the roof in recent months.
Gates said in a new post on his blog Tuesday that superintelligent AIs are in our future. Gates believes that AI will be on par with the capabilities of a human brain 10 to 100 years from now.
Our brains operate at a snail's pace compared to a computer: An electrical signal in the brain moves at 1 100,000th the speed of the signal in a silicon chip! AGI artificial general intelligence can do everything that a human brain can, but without any practical limits on the size of its memory or speed at which it operates, once developers can generalize a learning algorithm and run it at a speed that could be a decade away or a century away. This will be a huge change. Microsoft is making a huge bet today that the future will be heavily dependent on AI.
In early February, Microsoft unveiled a new version of its Bing search engine that is powered by a beefed-up version of OpenAI's ChatGPT natural language AI technology. Microsoft added last week that it would add ChatGPT to its 365 suite of business software, which includes Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
This comes after Microsoft unveiled a $10 billion investment in OpenAI in late January.
Microsoft isn't alone in pushing the AI narrative with investors as they try to unlock more tech spending among businesses and consumers.
Salesforce has announced Einstein GPT this month, which is the world's first generative AI customer relationship management CRM technology. Salesforce said that Einstein GPT can generate personalized emails for salespeople to send to customers, as well as create custom responses for key customer questions. It will be capable of auto-generating code for developers.
With this next generation of generative AI, it means that AI will be able to do even more for you, according to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who released a new set of tools in late January to support generative AI for enterprise applications.
Gates said that new AI tools will be a long way to improve learning and health care. The tech pioneer stressed that there are risks associated with AI that governments and society will have to address at the same time.
Gates noted that AIs could run out of control. Could a machine decide that humans are a threat, conclude that its interests are different from ours, or simply stop caring about us? Today's problem is no more urgent than before the AI developments of the past few months. You can follow Sozzi on Twitter and LinkedIn. Email brian.sozzi yahoofinance.com