Bill Gates feels Generative AI has plateaued, says GPT-5 will not be any better
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.
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.
I’m not sure I’d say it’s plateaued today but I definitely think machine learning is going to hit a wall soon. Some tech keeps improving until physical limits stop progress but I see generative AI as being more like self-driving cars where the “easy” parts end up solved but the last 10% is insanely hard.
There’s also the economic reality of scaling. Maybe the “hard” problems could, in theory, be easily solved with enough compute power. We’ll eventually solve those problems but it’s going to be on Nvidia’s timeline, not OpenAI’s.
Cool, Bill Gates has opinions. I think he's being hasty and speaking out of turn and only partially correct. From my understanding, the "big innovation" of GPT-4 was adding more parameters and scaling up compute. The core algorithms are generally agreed to be mostly the same from earlier versions (not that we know for sure since OpenAI has only released a technical report). Based on that, the real limit on this technology is compute and number of parameters (as boring as that is), and so he's right that the algorithm design may have plateaued. However, we really don't know what will happen if truly monster rigs with tens-of-trillions of parameters are used when trained on the entirety of human written knowledge (morality of that notwithstanding), and that's where he's wrong.
You got it the wrong way around. We already have a ton of compute and what this kind of AI can do is pretty cool.
But adding more compute power and parameters won't solve the inherent problems.
No matter what you do, it's still just a text generator guessing the next best word. It doesn't do real math or logic, it gets basic things wrong and hallucinates new fake facts.
Sure, it will get slightly better still, but not much. You can throw a million times the power at it and it will still fuck up in just the same ways.
This is short-sighted.
The jump to GPT 3.5 was preceded by the same general misunderstanding (we've reached the limit of what generative pre-trained transformers can do, we've reached diminishing returns, ECT.) and then a relatively small change (AFAIK it was a couple additional layers of transforms and a refinement of the training protocol) and suddenly it was displaying behaviors none of the experts expected.
Small changes will compound when factored over billions of nodes, that's just how it goes. It's just that nobody knows which changes will have that scale of impact, and what emergent qualities happen as a result.
It's ok to say "we don't know why this works" and also "there's no reason to expect anything more from this methodology". But I wouldn't dismiss further improvements as a forgone possibility.
it's still just a text generator guessing the next best word. It doesn't do real math or logic, it gets basic things wrong and hallucinates new fake facts.
If humans are any kind of yardstick here, I’d say all this is true of us too on many levels. The brain is a shortcut engine, not a brute force computer. It’s not solving equations to help you predict where that tennis ball will bounce next. It’s making guesses based on its corpus of past experience. Good enough guesses are frankly our brains’ bread and butter and most of us get through most days on little more than this.
It’s true that we can do more. Some of us, anyway. How many people actually exercise math and logic though? Sometimes it seems like… not a lot. And how many people hallucinate fake facts? A lot.
It’s much like evaluating self-driving cars. We may be tempted to say they’re just bloody awful, but so are human drivers.
I mean, that's more-or-less what I said. We don't know the theoretical limits of how good that text generation is when throwing more compute at it and adding parameters for the context window. Can it generate a whole book that is fairly convincing, write legal briefs off of the sum of human legal knowledge, etc.? Ultimately, the algorithm is the same, so like you said, the same problems persist, and the definition of "better" is wishy-washy.
Yeah and I think he may be scaling to like true AGI. Very possible LLMs just don't become AGI, you need some extra juice we haven't come up with yet, in addition to computational power no one can afford yet.
My hypothesis is that that "extra juice" is going to be some kind of body. More senses than text-input, and more ways to manipulate itself and the environment than text-output. Basically, right now llm's can kind of understand things in terms of text descriptions, but will never be able to understand it the way a human can until it has all of the senses (and arguably physical capabilities) that a human does. Thought experiment: Presumably you "understand" your dog - can you describe your dog without sensory details, directly or indirectly? Behavior had to be observed somehow. Time is a sense too. EDIT: before someone says it, as for feelings I'm not really sure, I'm not a biology guy. But my guess is we sense our own hormones as well
The problem is that between gpt 3 and 4 there is massive increase in number of parameters, but not massive increase in its abilities
I’ll listen to his opinions more than some, but unfortunately this article doesn’t say anything interesting about why he has this opinion. I guess the author supposes we will simply regard him as an oracle on name recognition alone.
Let me save you a click: he doesn’t say anything interesting about why he thinks this.
What does Bill Gates know about GenAI? Is he an expert on the subject?
He's not. He might pay experts, but he isn't one.
And the Wright Brothers said heavier than air flight would only ever be an amusement for the rich, and never commercially viable.
Even taking Gates' qualifications at face value doesn't mean he's actually right.
Source on that quote from the Wright brothers? Because they never said that as far as I'm aware.
They didn’t, AFAIK. It was a NYT article that quoted someone who made a similar prediction:
Once the Wright Brothers proved flight was possible, some assumed it was just a pointless rich play thing. Famed astronomer William H. Pickering said, “The expense would be prohibitive to any but the capitalist who could use his own yacht.”
You didn't read the Wright brothers or this article did you? Gates isn't at all damning AI tech. All he said is that gpt 5 is unlikely to be very different from 4. He's probably correct. A next best word algorithm can only go so far. Thats only a part of how language and cognition works. Until some sort of adjunct algorithm gets tagged on I don't think we will see big leaps either.
They are already bolting on multi modality, autonomous agent behavior and so on. Most uses are no longer just token prediction, but a whole soup of other models and data injection. That sort of combination of things will get us to the next level )and already has in many ways).
He just has money, which gives him and too many others the idea that he has expertise.
And a voice that should be heard
And 640k ought to be enough for anybody.
bill is a wanker. dont be like bill.
Now now. He only hired assholes and monsters to execute immoral MS mob style tactics, while he played the great innocent altruist.
Bill gates can fuck off.
Not a single comment yet stating how Gates is a great human being because of his foundation, and how all you haters should fuck the fuck off? sigh, let me the first one.
Just to make things extremely clear, the above comment has been sarcastic. He's an awful person.
They're upset he insulted their AI girlfriends.
You mean his tax haven?
I mean they've done some good things, but the capitalist system that gave him his wealth is the same one that causes poverty and his foundation isn't working to change that.
I hope so. Theyve already got scary implications for creative parts of the economy.
That said, we're in the Cambrian explosion of the tech. As it plateaus, the next step will be enhanced tooling and convenience around it. Better inputs than just text, better, more applications in new spaces, etc.
"GPT-4 should be enough for anyone." -Bill Gates
Isn’t this the same guy that said we won’t ever need more than 64K of RAM?
640k (the conventional limit in DOS), and he didn't actually say it.
But we have more areas to apply this to. I still can't ask my PC to do some work, like Unistall OneDrive or change a setting in the OS. Send a message on Teams. Where is Jarvis?
Having Generative AI make API calls on your behalf is a work in progress across pretty much every industry. It'll make complex tasks across multiple services a lot easier but it's definitely going to cause weird unpredictable behavior too.
That is why you have to confirm the action before execting
I wouldn’t trust it do everything yet, but it sure as hell would be useful to retrieve information. Wish I could just ask it “Hey, is the door locked?” and get an answer.
Maybe it could suggest actions, but I wouldn’t want to have it do anything without manual human confirmation, it’s too unreliable.
Bill Gates views on AI are about as insightful as Gordon Ramsey’s on orbital mechanics.
I've been saying this for years!
Maybe, but I am sure the tools the AIs can use will improve making the AIs jobs easier and thus the AI more efficient. I hope he is right tbh.
Eww, as a long time Linux user I need to take a shower now. I feel dirty.
The next big steps coming right now are AI trained on generative data and agents that act more automatically (rather than waiting for a prompt, take an action like searching the web and act on that to better complete the goal for example), and better indexed data so generated data can be informed by and cite sources in the moment.
On the one hand, I don't really know enough about AI to comment. What I do remember is that, Bill Gates said the Internet was just a fad in the 90s. This comment caused myself and others problems promoting the Internet in workplaces because those in charge for some reason put some weight to his words. :p
If it comes from Billyboy, he could be right in the sense that it won't get any better for the filthy commoners
Bill, you're not even AT Microsoft anymore.
Edit: AND, you think a box of Pizza Rolls cost nearly 3 times as much as they actually do. I'm not trusting your opinion, man
Why does him being rich mean that his opinion on LLMs is invalid? If anything, LLMs require such vast amounts of money that he has more experience in that area because of his riches, not less.
Since I started using AI in March, it has not stop getting better and better with it seemingly accelerating not decelerating. If we are heading to a plateau, there are no signs of it yet. I am sure there will be plateaus, and maybe we have even had one earlier this year, but with the speed of AI development, it may mean a plateau of months versus the normal years. We will see. Bill has been saying a lot of things these past years that make no sense, unless you look at it from a money/market manipulation perspective.