Bill Gates feels Generative AI has plateaued, says GPT-5 will not be any better::The billionaire philanthropist in an interview with German newspaper Handelsblatt, shared his thoughts on Artificial general intelligence, climate change, and the scope of AI in the future.
This is exactly it. And it’s funny you’re getting downvoted.
We don’t truly know the depth of ML yet and how these general models could potential change when a few vectors in the equation change, and that’s the big unknown with it. I agree with you here that Gates’ opinion is just that and isn’t particularly well informed. Especially in comparison to what some of the industry and ML experts are saying about how far we can go with the models, how they will evolve as we change parameters/vectors/dependencies and the impact of that evolution on potential applications. It’s just too early.
I kinda get why I’m getting downvoted, honestly. The ChatGPT fanboys definitely give off an “NFT-grindset” kind of vibe, and they can be loud and overzealous with their prognosticating. It feels cathartic to make fun of the thing they’ve adopted as a centerpiece of their personality
None of that changes what is objectively the very real and very unexpected improvement these models are displaying, and we’re still not sure what it is they’re doing behind the curtain. “Predicting the next most likely word” is simply not a sufficient explanation for how these models seem to correctly interpret intent and apply factual knowledge stored in its dataset in abstract ways.
People want to squabble over anthropomorphic word choices and debate ‘consiousness’, and fair enough, its an interesting question. But that doesn’t really come close to what’s really interesting about the models gaining functionality when by all accounts they should only be ‘guessing the next most likely word’.
I’m not really interested in debating people who are performatively unimpressed by these products, but it bothers me that those people continue rolling their eyes when significant advancements are made. Like sure, it’s not new that ML algorithms can decode keystrokes from an audio recording, but it’s a big deal when those models can be run on consumer grade hardware and not just a super computer run by a three letter agency.