Microsoft founder says he’s “pretty impressed” with artificial intelligence
Billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has spoken again in recent hours and predicted what technology he believes will cause the next technological revolution like the Internet did in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Through his Reddit account, the tycoon considered what technology caught his attention the most in a conversation with his followers on that social network.
Gates told them to ask him questions on any topic, and he would answer them. Thus, a user asked him about what he believes is the most emerging and promising technology in the short term.
Thus, the former director of Microsoft responded that the Metaverse or augmented reality does not attract his attention so much, but rather that from his point of view the most important advance that the technological world is making is the one related to artificial intelligence (A.I).
He said that the AI is the biggest and that he doesn’t think Web3 is that big or that the metaverse features alone are revolutionary, but the AI is pretty revolutionary.
In that sense, Gates noted that he is “quite impressed with the rate of improvement” of generative AIs. “They will have a huge impact.”
Bill Gates made economic predictions for 2023 from his blog.
Considering the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the effects of the COVID-19 epidemic, he predicted that 2023 would be a challenging year.
There will be a civil war and unpleasant elections, he added, adding that “there are five rough years ahead” due to the pandemic’s debts and changing economic cycles.
Since I lack knowledge in these areas and would be unable to handle them, I will not spend my money on them. Polarization in politics is potentially fatal.
VALL-E, Microsoft’s artificial intelligence
Microsoft is developing VALL-E, a technology based on artificial intelligence (AI) that is capable of learning and imitating any voice based on a three-second recording.
The American technology company is betting on the implementation of AI in its products and services.
In this sense, it is working on projects to add the chat developed by OpenAI ChatGPT to its browsers and the Office suite.
Following this line, Microsoft has presented its VALL-E AI project, a Text-to-Speech (TTS) language model that synthesizes text to transform it into voice.
The new aspect of this technology is its capacity for context-based learning, which can imitate the voices of recordings with just three seconds of audio.
In other words, as Microsoft explains in a document shared on GitHub, VALL-E can synthesize “high-quality” custom voices with a recorded three-second recording of a speaker.
Its developers also point out that the samples taken suggest that VALL-E could “preserve the emotion of the speaker and the acoustic environment of the message.”
The company stressed that this technology “significantly” outperforms other TTS systems in terms of naturalness of speech and similarity to the speaker.
The TTS training data was scaled to 60,000 hours of English speaking during the pre-training phase, which the creators claim is “hundreds of times” more than what is currently available in systems.
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