[pdm55]

Reading the transcript of Bill Gates's (Nov 16) interview with Yejin Choi (University of Washington / Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence), one gets the impression that AI is still in its teething stages:

YEJIN CHOI: Usually, the smaller models cannot win over ChatGPT in all dimensions, but if you have a target task, like a math tutoring, I do believe that definitely, not only you can close the gap with larger models, you can actually surpass the larger model’s capability by specializing on it. This is totally doable, and I believe in it.

BILL GATES: Certainly for something like drug discovery, knowing English isn’t necessary. It’s kind of weird, these models are so big that very few people get to probe them or change them in some way. And yet, in the world of Computer Science, the majority of everything that was ever invented was invented in universities. To not have this in a form that people can play around with, and take a hundred different approaches to play around with, we have to find some way to fix that, to let universities be pushing these things, and looking inside these things.

YEJIN CHOI: I couldn’t agree with you more. It cannot be very healthy to see this concentration of powers so that the major AI is only held by a few tech companies, and nobody knows what’s going on under the hood. That’s just not healthy. Especially when it is extremely likely that there is a moderate size solution that is open, that people can investigate and better understand and even better control, actually. Because if you open it, it’s so much easier for you to adapt it into your custom use cases, compared to the current way of using GPT-4, which all that you can do is sort of a prompt engineering, and then hope that it understood what you meant.

https://assets.gatesnotes.com/8a5ac0b3-6095-00af-c50a-89056f...