Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates knows a thing or two about technology. The entrepreneur is best known as the co-founder of Microsoft, a company he reportedly started in his garage. Microsoft is now the world's second-most valuable company, with a market cap of $2.38 trillion. So, when Bill Gates talks about technology, investors tend to listen.
At the Goldman Sachs and SV Angel AI Forward 2023 event, Gates said the race is on to develop a top-tier digital assistant, or personal agent -- as he calls it -- powered by artificial intelligence (AI), and the technology could have dramatic implications for the future. In fact, if Gates is right, it could spell big trouble for the likes of Amazon (AMZN 0.41%), Shopify (SHOP 0.23%), and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (GOOGL 0.57%).
Given Gates' tech pedigree, should investors run out and sell their shares of these technology titans? Not so fast.
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Changing the face of technology as we know it
Recent advances in the field of AI have been captivating, as evidenced by next-generation chatbots, including ChatGPT -- the brainchild of tech start-up OpenAI. While challenges remain, the technology marked the next big step forward in conversational and generative AI. The ability of these AI models to engage in human-like conversation, answer complex questions, and summarize complicated data caught many by surprise.
Digital assistants like Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple's Siri have been around for years, but the advances demonstrated by ChatGPT -- while still flawed -- were light-years ahead of its predecessors.
Gates believes that the company that develops the first truly revolutionary personal agent will alter the course of human development, disrupting existing technology and changing human behavior in the process.
If the acceleration of AI continues and yields a tool that can comprehend human desires and needs, it will be so profound as to cause a radical shift in behavior. "Whoever wins the personal agent, that's the big thing, because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you'll never go to Amazon again," Gates said.
Of course, such a tool has yet to be developed. And it will be some time before it's ready for mainstream use, but recent advancements in AI have taken us one step closer. Gates suggested that such a personal agent could understand individual habits and, for example, help "read the stuff you don't have time to read."
When pressed as to who would develop this disruptive technology, Gates said there was a 50-50 chance that it would be an existing tech giant or a start-up. He went on to say, "I'd be disappointed if Microsoft didn't come in there. But I'm impressed with a couple of startups, including Inflection." This was a reference to Inflection.AI, a machine learning start-up co-founded by former DeepMind exec Mustafa Suleyman and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Not everyone agrees
As advanced as these latest AI models are, they still have a long way to go, and not everyone agrees the future is imminent. Rodney Brooks, noted robotics engineer and AI expert, suggests we shouldn't "mistake performance for confidence."
Brooks would know. He's a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and former professor of robotics and director of the computer science and AI laboratory at MIT. When discussing the current state of the large language models (LLMs) behind evolving chatbot technology, he said, "When you poke it, you find that it doesn't have the logical inference that it may have seemed to have."
In working with LLMs, he notes that while these chatbots seem self-assured, they can also be very wrong, adding: "It gives an answer with complete confidence, and I sort of believe it. And half the time, it's completely wrong ... That's not the same as intelligence. It's not the same as interacting. It's looking it up."
That, in a nutshell, explains the current limitations of these next-generation chatbots. They are very good at locating data but don't have the logic to discern if the information they're passing along makes any sense.
Given the limitations of the technology -- and with all deference to Bill Gates -- for investors holding shares of Amazon, Shopify, and Alphabet, there's no need to rush off and hit the sell button -- at least not anytime soon.
