Bill Gates Supports AI Progress To Accelerate Vaccine Development And Global Health

Bill Gates, in one of its humanitarian activities in India. (photo: twitter @billgates)

JAKARTA - Bill Gates supports advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology and states that technologies such as ChatGPT can bring about a revolution just like cell phones and the internet. Gates even believes that the "emergence of AI" will increase humanity, increase productivity, reduce global inequality, and accelerate the development of new vaccines.

AI technology can find new pathways to design drugs and detect human-eye errors. The Microsoft founder has also spent billions of dollars to bring medicine to developing countries and believes that AI tools are the largest human weapons against disease and deadly viruses.

"One of the priorities of the Gates Foundation in AI is to ensure that these tools are used for health problems affecting the world's poor, including AIDS, TB, and malaria," Gates said in a blog post, quoted by the Daily Mail.

Gates is a pioneer in the world of technology, establishing Microsoft in 1975 which leads to the Windows 95 operating system. Now he is paying close attention to AI, focusing on how the technology will benefit health care.

"AI will dramatically accelerate the medical breakthrough rate," Gates wrote. "The amount of data in biology is huge, and it is difficult for humans to track down all the ways that complex biological systems work." The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is involved in many vaccines and it appears that Microsoft founders believe that AI will improve the development and speed it releases.

However, one vaccine funded by the organization designed to minimize polio may have paralyzed (a buildup of) six children with the virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Using AI allows vaccines to be tested in various ways that humans cannot do on study subjects - and is expected to find faults so that problems in Africa don't happen again.

Microsoft has also applied AI to its Bing search engine, which provides a clear answer in easy-to-understand language drawn from what Bing found in its web and data warehouse.

Microsoft announced in January a $10 billion investment into OpenAI, the ChatGPT maker, to help expand chatbot development by providing the necessary resources.

Although Gates is optimistic about AI's future, he is not blind to his shortcomings. "We have to remember that we are only at the beginning of what AI can achieve," he wrote. "Whatever the limitations are, it will disappear before we realize it."