AI to help children in reading and writing within next 18 months: Bill Gates

AI chatbots would be used to improve children’s reading and writing skills within the next 18 months, predicted Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. The statement comes while he was talking at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, US, as per the Gates Notes. While conversating on the AI, Gates explained: "AIs will get to that ability, to be as good a tutor as any human ever could.” Recently, the AI chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, have been developed rapidly over the months and have been competing with human-level intelligence on some standardised tests, as per the Blog Of Bill Gates. 

Bill Gates on AI Chatbot's Future in Education

While sharing insights on the future of AI in teaching, Gates asserted that teaching writing skills in a traditional manner has been difficult for computers, as they lack the cognitive ability to replicate human thought processes. However, AI chatbots have been recognising and recreating human-like language. The tech columnist of the New York Times Kevin Roose has already used this technology, ChatGPT, to improve his writing. With the use of the AI’s ability to quickly search through online style guides, it has made the job easy, reported the NY Times. In Gates Notes, Bill Gates asserted: "I am really quite optimistic that the field of education will improve."

During the fireside chat at the summit, He said: "If you just took the next 18 months, the AIs will come in as a teacher’s aide and give feedback on writing." Further, he added: "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's adoption." He also assured that we have good tools today and if one fully adopts them then that could lead to progress in math scores that we’ve made in the last 20 years. He added, " So my optimism about edtech (education Technology) 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." Notably, there have been free versions of chatbots which were existing already however, the co-founder of Microsoft has been expecting that more advanced versions would be available for a fee. He also believes that these technologies would be easily affordable and accessible in comparison to one-on-one tutoring with a human instructor.