Billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in a keynote talk on Tuesday (25th July 2023) at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego said that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots can help kids learn to read and polish their writing abilities in as little as 18 months.
He said, "The AI's will get to that ability, to be as good a tutor as any human ever could."
Mr. Gates is quite optimistic about AI chatbots, and he believes that AI will soon assist children in improving their reading and writing abilities in ways that technology has never been able to do before. He said that "today's chatbots have incredible fluency when it comes to being able to read and write."
"At first, we'll be most stunned by how it helps with reading - being a reading research assistant - and giving you feedback on writing," said Mr Gates.
During the keynote speech, Mr. Gates said that teaching writing abilities to a computer has proved to be an extremely difficult undertaking to do. In addition, he said that it used to be difficult for programmers to simulate high-cognitive activities using code.
However, the fact that an AI chatbot now has the capability to understand and replicate human-like language alters that dynamic, he pointed out.
"If you just took the next 18 months, the AIs will come in as a teacher's aide and give feedback on writing," Mr. Gates said. After that, they will boost what we are able to perform in terms of mathematics.
Mr. Gates predicted that artificial intelligence chatbots will become more accessible and at a lower cost. This should be a leveller, "Because having access to a tutor is too expensive for the majority of students, particularly if you want that tutor to adapt to everything that you've done and remember everything that you've done while also looking across your entire body of work."
