I dream everybody can have an AI tutor, an AI doctor: Satya Nadella

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella has revealed his dream that everyone of earth's 8 billion people can have an AI tutor, an AI doctor, a programmer or maybe an AI consultant in the future.

In an interview with Wired, Nadella, 55, said that AI is going to be democratised.

"I was in India in January and saw an amazing demo. The government has a programme called Digital Public Goods, and one is a text-to-speech system. In the demo, a rural farmer was using the system to ask about a subsidy programme he saw on the news. It told him about the programme and the forms he could fill out to apply," Nadella said.

"Normally, it would tell him where to get the forms. But one developer in India had trained GPT on all the Indian government documents, so the system filled it out for him automatically, in a different language," he added.

According to him, something created a few months earlier on the West Coast in the US had made its way to a developer in India, who then wrote a model that allows a rural Indian farmer to get the benefits of that technology on a WhatsApp bot on a mobile phone.

"My dream is that every one of Earth's 8 billion people can have an AI tutor, an AI doctor, a programmer, maybe a consultant,a he noted.

On a question that we are going to hit that artificial general intelligence (AGI) superintelligence benchmark, Nadella said he is much more focused on the benefits to all of humanity.

"I am haunted by the fact that the industrial revolution didn't touch the parts of the world where I grew up until much later. So I am looking for something that may be even bigger than the industrial revolution, and really doing what the industrial revolution did for the West, for everyone in the world".

"So I'm not at all worried about AGI showing up, or showing up fast. Great, right? That means 8 billion people have abundance. That's a fantastic world to live in," he added.

On controlling or even stopping AI experiments, as being asked by a group of top AI researchers and billionaire entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Nadella said that instead of just saying stop, "I would say we should speed up the work that needs to be done to create these alignments".

"To align an AI model with the world, you have to align it in the world and not in some simulation," he stressed.

--IANS

na/shb/