Washington: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has predicted that AI chatbots will help children learn to read and enhance their writing skills in just 18 months’ time. As CNBC reports, the billionaire philanthropist said at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego that AI will “be as good a tutor as any human ever could.”
Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in late November last year, companies have been in a rush to either launch similar products or plug generative AI technology into existing products. The fierce competition has also stimulated rapid development over the past few months, and ChatGPT-like chatbots can now compete with human-level intelligence on certain standardised tests.
Reminding people about that, Bill Gates said that today’s chatbots have “incredible fluency at being able to read and write.” This, he said, will soon help students to improve their own reading and writing in ways that technology has never done before.
“If you just took the next 18 months, the AIs will come in as a teacher’s aide and give feedback on writing,” he continued. “And then they will amp up what we’re able to do in math.”
Teaching writing skills has so far been an extremely difficult task for a computer, Gates noted. While human teachers look for traits like narrative structure and clarity of prose, computers haven’t been able to do that since that level of analysis is tough for developers to replicate in code, he said.
Bill Gates also highlighted the cost factor of AI tutors saying they’ll be cheaper and more accessible than one-on-one human tutoring.
“This should be a leveller,” he said. “Because having access to a tutor is too expensive for most students — especially having that tutor adapt and remember everything that you’ve done and look across your entire body of work.”
This isn’t the first time Gates has voiced his excitement about the technology. In an interaction with Anant Goenka during the fifth Ramnath Goenka Lecture in March, Bill Gates admitted that he’s a fan of ChatGPT and likes to play around with it when friends come over. Later that month, he again gushed about the technology saying it will reduce inequities in the world.
Agencies

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