Bill Gates has a doomsday prediction, says AI could kill Google Search and Amazon

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has a doomsday prediction for the likes of Google, Amazon and other tech giants. Speaking at an event in San Francisco, Gates said that a future Artificial Intelligence (AI) personal assistant would be so efficient and profound that other competitors will not be able to stand their ground.

Gates said the first company to develop such a programme will be the market leader and could potentially alter user behaviour for good.

“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,” said Gates.

Gates posited that there is a 50-50 chance that the future AI winner will be either a startup or a tech giant.

“I’d be disappointed if Microsoft didn’t come in there. But I’m impressed with a couple of startups, including Inflection,” said Gates, referring to Inflection.AI, co-founded by former DeepMind executive Mustafa Suleyman.

Gates remains bullish about AI

Gates is one of the few industry giants that is extremely bullish about the future of AI. Last month, he said AI might be able to teach children how to 'read and write' in the coming year or two.

“If you just took the next 18 months, the AIs will come in as a teacher’s aide and give feedback on writing. And then they will amp up what we’re able to do in math. Our bottleneck in math really is more of how we fit in the overall system and getting that teacher adoption," wrote the billionaire on his website “Gates Notes”.

He said AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT Plus may charge for the service, but they will still be more accessible and affordable compared to traditional human tutoring.

LLMs and their future

Large Language Models like OpenAI's GPT-3 powering ChatGPT and Google's LaMDA powering Bard are exceptionally good at learning and executing tasks on the fly.

Within a few months of ChatGPT's debut, the AI field has made tremendous strides. With future LLMs expected to build upon previous knowledge, just the way humans do,according to a recent MIT study, Gates' theory might come to fruition, in reality,sooner than expected.

(With inputs from agencies)

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