MIAMI, United States. – Microsoft’s corporate vice president and chief marketing officer, Yusuf Mehdi, says that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots will not become more intelligent than people, since these tools need human judgment to work.
In an interview with EFEMehdi indicates that “humans are the ones connecting with the AI and telling the AI what to do.”
Mehdi attributes fears around AI to the novelty of these tools, which caught on six months ago with the launch of ChatGPT from OpenAI, and AI chatbot ads on Edge and Google search engines, Bing and Bard, respectively, three months ago. However, he believes that these fears will diminish as people understand the technology better.
British AI expert Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “godfather” of AI and a Google contributor, recently expressed his concerns about the risks associated with these new technologies in an interview with The New York Times. Hinton believed that AI would surpass human intelligence within 30 to 50 years, but now he thinks it will happen sooner than anticipated.
Mehdi explains that Microsoft focuses on responsibility in building AI, applying principles such as transparency, child protection, inclusion, and global reach. In addition, he points out that AI will affect employment in three ways: it will increase productivity, it will create new jobs and, in some cases, it will eliminate jobs, especially those that are more automated.
To back up his claims, Mehdi recalls how, in the past, it was believed that calculators and Excel spreadsheets would do away with the need for accountants, which they didn’t. However, some experts, such as Gary Marcus, author of two books on AI, warn about the effects that job losses will have on the social fabric.
Microsoft launched Bing, its AI-powered chatbot, in February, using OpenAI’s GPT-4 and DALL-E 2 technology, in combination with Microsoft’s search results index. This week, the company announced that Bing will be available for free to all users of the Microsoft Edge browser.
In its first 90 days of public life, Bing participated in more than 500 million chats and generated more than 200 million images. Mehdi claims that 70 percent of user reviews were positive. To address complaints about disruptive responses in long conversations, Microsoft initially limited interactions to six questions, but this week increased the limit to 20.
Mehdi believes that as AI becomes more popular, new uses for the technology will be discovered. Some users already use Bing as a social chat mechanism, something the company hadn’t initially anticipated.
