At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella threw his support behind the revolutionary potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In a discussion with Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Nadella brought up ChatGPT as an example of a technology that is improving the lives of people in rural India.
OpenAI’s artificial intelligence business has created a chatbot driven by the artificial intelligence called ChatGPT. The technology operates by learning from enormous amounts of data how to respond to any query posed by a user in a human-like manner, providing information similar to a search engine.
Satya Nadella described a farmer in rural India who, despite knowing only the local dialect, was able to access a government program with the assistance of ChatGPT.
“Now, in India, one of the most unique things that are occurring is the development of digital public goods, and one of these digital public goods is language translation,” he stated. Therefore, they have an open-source initiative that allows anyone developing an application in India to translate between any of the Indian languages.
In an early January demonstration in India, a rural farmer was attempting to utilize a government program, according to Nadella.
“He communicated a complicated demand in one of the native languages. This was then translated and understood by a bot, which replied with a link to a site and instructions on how to access the software,” as disclosed by the CEO of Microsoft.
The farmer was afraid to use the program, so he asked a bot to complete the task on his behalf.
“And, it did it, and the reason it was able to do it was that the developer developing it had taken GPT [General Purpose Technology] and trained it on all of the government of India’s documents, and then augmented it with speech recognition software,” Nadella stated.
Reuters reported earlier this month that Microsoft is expanding access to wildly popular software from OpenAI, a business it is sponsoring and whose futuristic ChatGPT chatbot has captivated Silicon Valley. Microsoft has considered raising its $1 billion investment in San Francisco-based OpenAI.
