What has taken the world by storm is the arrival of ChatGPT in late November, 2022. In the development of artificial intelligence, this is a seminal moment. OpenAI introduced GPT series, where GPT stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer which seems to guide the AI domain.

In a recent interview to a German newspaper Handelsblatt, Bill Gates, 67, founder of Microsoft who backs OpenAI feels that the GPT technology has plateaued. He, of course, added that this could be a wrong belief. His main contention was that contrary to popular opinion about GPT-5, he believes that the current generative AI has reached its zenith. The progress between GPT-2 and GPT-4 is incredible.

The next few years will be for consolidation of AI, increasing its accuracy, and reducing its cost. He does not see a breakthrough between GPT-4 and GPT-5. Of course, in the short-term, AI is full of potential, and will tremendously benefit the developing nations. There could health counselling online and on smart phones. AI can benefit healthcare, new drug development and vaccine making.

He spoke about GPU chips costing high — say $30000 a piece. These chips consume lot of electricity and large amount of computing power. There is reduction in cost per query — from ten cents previously to 3 cents now. The costs of computing power and chips, however, remain high.

Bill Gates spoke about the blackbox whose inner workings are not known. There are many individuals who try to decipher AI’s internal workings. Bill Gates is not sure about the arrival of AGI, but agreed that it can have profound effect on humanity.