TECHNOLOGY

Bill Gates says A.I. chatbots will teach kids to read within 18 months: You’ll be ‘stunned by how it helps’

Soon, artificial intelligence could help teach your kids and improve their grades. That’s according to billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who says AI chatbots are on track to help children learn to read and hone their writing skills in 18 months’ time. “The AI’s will get to that ability, to be as good a tutor as any human ever could,” Gates said in a keynote talk on Tuesday at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego. AI chatbots, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, have developed rapidly over the past several months, and can now compete with human-level intelligence on certain standardized tests. That growth has sparked both excitement over the technology’s potential and debate over the possible negative consequences. Count Gates in the camp of people who are impressed. Today’s chatbots have “incredible fluency at being able to read and write,” which will soon help them teach students to improve their own reading and writing in ways that technology never could before, he said. “At first, we’ll be most stunned by how it helps with reading — being a reading research assistant — and giving you feedback on writing,” said Gates. Historically, teaching writing skills has proven to be an incredibly difficult task for a computer, Gates noted. When teachers give feedback on essays, they look for traits like narrative structure and clarity of prose — a “high-cognitive exercise” that’s “tough” for developers to replicate in code, he said. But AI chatbots’ ability to recognize and recreate […]