Bill gates thinks AI can teach children to ‘read, write’ within next 18 months

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently spoke positively about the use of AI in teaching children to read and write.

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked a debate on whether it can outperform humans in various domains. This has led to several tests being conducted to compare the performance of AI and humans. One such test was conducted on the revolutionary chatbot, ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, to evaluate its ability to solve the toughest competitive exams.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (AFP)

Moreover, questions have been raised about how students can leverage AI to enhance their learning. In light of all of these educational related topics, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently spoke positively about the use of AI in teaching children to read and write.

On his website “Gates Notes”, the technologist-turned-philanthropist mentioned about a keynote talk at the ASU+GSV Summit in US' San Diego, where he predicted that within the next 18 months, AI will serve as a teacher's aide, providing feedback on writing.

“If you just took the next 18 months, the AIs will come in as a teacher’s aide and give feedback on writing. And then they will amp up what we’re able to do in math. Our bottleneck in math really is more of how we fit in the overall system and getting that teacher adoption," Gates said in the interview.

For this AI-powered tutoring services like ChatGPT Plus may come at a cost, but Bill Gates argues that they will still be more affordable and accessible than traditional human tutoring.

"We have very good tools today, that if they were fully adopted, would actually make more progress in math scores than we’ve made in the last 20 years. So my optimism about edtech in general is not just because of AI. It is a set of things, even before this latest advance, that I think we’re getting smarter about and getting out into the field,” Gates further said.

Earlier in March, in a blog post titled “The Age of AI has begun”, Gates expressed his belief that AI-driven software will deliver on the promise of revolutionizing the way people teach and learn. He hailed the invention of ChatGPT as a revolutionary technological demonstration, similar to his introduction to the graphical user interface in the 1980s.

Gates was inspired by his first meeting with the GPT model and has been thinking about the potential of AI in the next 10 years. He further emphasized that the focus should be on making these AI-driven tools available to low-income countries and disadvantaged populations.