On Thursday, Bill Gates released the latest episode of his podcast, “Unconfuse Me.” This episode featured a conversation between Gates and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, one of the leading artificial intelligence (AI) research organizations in the world.

Below are key takeaways from the conversation between Bill Gates and Sam Altman on the future of artificial intelligence.

The three most important milestones for AI in the next two years are:

Improved reasoning and reliability

Multimodal development (voice input/output, images/videos)

Customization and personalization, generating different styles and sets of assumptions according to different needs

The scary thing about AI is:

This is the "fastest" technological revolution in human history. How fast society needs to adapt to its development, and how the labor market will change.

Existing AI models will become the dumbest models. At least in the next five to ten years, this technology will be on a very steep growth curve.

The cost of AI systems decreases each time they are evaluated. The cost of GPT-3 has decreased by 40 times in the more than three years since its introduction, and the cost of GPT-3.5 has decreased by nearly 10 times.

The basic model of the world consists of the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy. Lowering the cost of intelligence to near zero would be a transformative change for society.

In the future, extremely powerful systems will be systems with 100,000 or 1 million times the computational power of GPT-4. AI will affect society, the balance of geopolitical forces, and many other things. Therefore, a global institution may be needed to regulate the world's most powerful few systems, similar to the way the International Atomic Energy Agency regulates nuclear weapons.

Where will humans go after AI matures? Ultimately, AI will be able to do more things similar to what humans do today. Humans will of course find new and better jobs.

For example, if AI can triple the efficiency of programmers, it is not just that they can do three times as many things, but that they can think about completely different things at a higher level of abstraction and use more brain power, which is a qualitative improvement.

Although we will give up some things in a sense, we will have something smarter than humans. If we can enter this "post-scarcity" world, we will find new things to do, such as deciding which galaxy we like.

Most people misjudge risk. They are afraid to leave their comfortable jobs and do what they really want to do. Clearly defining what you want to do and asking others for what you want will have unexpected rewards.

Cover image: file photo(Li Menglin)