Bill Gates does not say this kind of thing lightly; the last time he compared something to the internet, it was the internet. In an interview with the German business daily Handelsblatt the Microsoft co-founder said that ChatGPT, the chatbot released by OpenAI in November, is as significant as the invention of the internet and “will change our world”. “Until now, artificial intelligence could read and write but could not understand the content,” he said. “New programs like ChatGPT will make many office jobs more efficient by helping to write invoices or letters.”
Why this week
The interview landed in the most consequential week the technology industry has had in a decade. On Monday 6 February Google, which invented the transformer architecture ChatGPT is built on and had kept its own chatbot in the lab, announced Bard. On Tuesday Microsoft — which has now invested $10 billion in OpenAI — unveiled a new Bing and Edge browser with the ChatGPT model built in, and Satya Nadella declared “the race starts today”. On Wednesday Google’s Bard demonstration was found to contain a factual error about the James Webb telescope, and Alphabet’s shares fell 9 per cent, roughly $100 billion. Gates, who left Microsoft’s board in 2020 but still advises it, was speaking as the company he founded took its best shot at Google’s search business in twenty years.
What ChatGPT is, briefly
A large language model trained on a vast corpus of text, which produces the most plausible continuation of whatever you type — and does so well enough to write essays, code, poems and letters. It launched on 30 November and reached 100 million users in two months, faster than TikTok. It is also frequently wrong, knows nothing after 2021 and has no access to the live web; Bing’s version is Microsoft’s attempt to fix the last two.
The view from Dhaka
ChatGPT was blocked from signing up Bangladeshi phone numbers in its first weeks and has since opened; by February it was the most discussed piece of software in the country’s universities, where teachers were already finding its prose in assignments. Its Bangla is poor — fluent-looking, error-prone — which for now protects Bangla-language work and disadvantages Bangla-language users in equal measure. Gates’s prediction about invoices and letters is the one to watch here: the country’s BPO and back-office industry, 90,000 jobs, does exactly the work he describes as about to become more efficient.
How the prediction aged
Partly right, and wrong about the thing everyone was watching. Microsoft did embed the technology everywhere — Copilot across Word, Excel, Outlook and Windows — and became the most visible enterprise AI vendor in the world. But the specific bet behind that week, that AI search would take meaningful share from Google, did not pay off: Bing’s share barely moved, and Google kept the search market it has held for two decades.
The office-work prediction is the one still resolving. The clearest early effects landed not on knowledge work in general but on the most templated, highest-volume categories — routine copywriting, first-draft translation, basic customer support scripts — which is precisely where Bangladesh’s BPO industry sits. Whether that means fewer seats or more work per seat is the question this piece raised, and three years on it is still being answered differently in different firms.
Source: Reuters, via Prothom Alo.
