According to The New York Times, Microsoft founder Bill Gates was interacting with a group of college students in 2004. Reportedly, he a bit concerned about the drop in the number of computer science majors, as well as the notion that the field had matured and there weren’t many breakthroughs left to achieve and flourish in the area.
One student expressed his doubt that there would ever be another tech company as successful as Microsoft. Gates’ reply is eye-opening: ”If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, so machines can learn, that is worth 10 Microsofts.”
It was observed that Gates was very much conservative in his estimates. Experts say the market opportunity is presently far greater than 10 Microsofts. And Gates isn’t alone in his optimism. Other top business leaders are also on board.
When machines go to college:
- Machine learning has been referred to before as the initiation of the current AI explosion. It’s “simply” software that ingests information, learns from it, and can then form a conclusion about something in the world.
- Thus, the prime way to understanding machine learning is the software that writes itself. Instead of explicitly programming software what to do, users instead provide it with large amounts of data and let it learn on its own. This lets machine learning to solve problems that earlier software with even billions of lines of code couldn’t have solved.
- A stronger subset of machine learning is deep learning, which initiates how neurons in the human brain strengthen connections between one another for learning purposes.
As processors become ever faster, storage gets cheaper, software better, and data collection more efficient, AI will only become smarter and ever more essential. It’s now clear that the great leading companies of the next decade and beyond will additionally be the most innovative one in the development and utilization of AI.
