Bill Gates speaks during an event. File

Gulf Today Report

The American billionaire Bill Gates predicted, "artificial intelligence will soon start teaching children to read and help them raise their academic results."

In a speech delivered at the annual "ASU + GSV" conference, which brings together leading minds from Arizona State University and Silicon Valley, and focuses on transforming society and business towards science and work, the co-founder of Microsoft said in a speech delivered at the annual "ASU + GSV" conference, "Smart chatbots will soon be able to help children learn reading and honing their writing skills within 18 months, and it will be a good teacher just like humans.”

Gates is a fan of the development of intelligent chatbots, such as ChatGBT from OpenAI and Cool from Google, and its ability to compete with humans in some joint tests, which sparked controversy among some about the potential of technology and its potential negative consequences.

Gates pointed out that "chatbots today have amazing fluency in reading and writing, which will be reflected in teaching students and improving their reading and writing in technical ways that will surprise us all in a way that was not possible before."

Avoid errors

Historically, Gates believes that “learning writing skills was a very difficult cognitive task for a computer, but the ability of intelligent chatbots to recognize and recreate human-like language changed that dynamic.”

At the same time, some academics have praised the chatbots' ability to summarize and provide comments on portions of text, or even write entire articles themselves.

However, those same people warn that the technology is not yet 100% formed and could, inadvertently, cause major errors or craft misinformation.

As Gates noted in his speech, AI technology must improve reading skills and paraphrase human language to better motivate students before it can become an officially certified teacher.

Mathematics

Ironically, as Gates pointed out, “emerging AI systems like ChatGPT are not yet strong in mathematics,” as he said, “If we imagine the next 18 months, AI will be a teacher's assistant and provide feedback on how to write, then the robots will improve what we can do in mathematics, as artificial intelligence still needs improved thinking capabilities to deal with the complexity of mathematical operations.

It is true that it may take some time, but Gates is confident that "the technology will probably improve within a couple of years."

Then, it can help make private tutoring available, affordable, to a wide range of students.