Bill Gates has proven his knowledge and skills over the past decades when it comes to technological innovations. He believes that Artificial Intelligence is currently like a “stochastic parrot” and is missing something specific.
What is it that AI still lacks? In the podcast of the Next Big Idea Club, Gates discussed the future of AI and how he envisions its development in the coming years. It currently lacks the dimension of thinking that is taken for granted in humans.
The new frontier that AI needs to reach is “metacognition.” This would mean that the system is aware of having its own thinking. This way, AI could think like a human and come to different conclusions instead of always arriving at the “learned” conclusion.
Gates even calls metacognition the “Holy Grail,” so that AI would no longer just be a simple assistant for improving our abilities. Through awareness of its own knowledge, AI could make us “superhumans.”
Progress in AI Will Stagnate
What does Gates predict for the coming years? Gates is impressed by the rapid development of this technology. However, he believes that AI models like ChatGPT and Llama lack “refinement.” They would not do anything unexpected that they were not previously taught.
Without metacognition, the current models would advance several generations further. There would even be a consistently faster improvement in their reactions. However, two problems would still remain:
- The learning capacity would reach its limits and would need to be addressed by oversized training data and computing power.
- The reliability and accuracy would still be lacking due to the absence of metacognition.
Artificial intelligence must learn to think broadly about the problem. The issues should be roughly broken down, all its variables recognized, and reassembled. In this way, AI could provide a creative solution that it has not been taught by anyone.
Bill Gates relies on metacognition. Additionally, he believes that neither renewable energy nor nuclear fusion is the future of power supply. He relies on a special metal that is to be used as a coolant for nuclear reactors: Bill Gates already knows the energy source of the future, relying on a special metal.
