Is Bill Gates right on AI – especially on speed of adoption?

So Bill Gates has posted an interesting piece on AI on his GatesNotes – see https://www.gatesnotes.com/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-choices-to-make

Several of his arguments have been rehearsed before, but the one that caught my eye was on the speed of adoption. Bill writes:

‘We have no experience with a technology that can be adopted quickly or that can think and move like a human. When the PC came along, it took twenty years to significantly change how we worked because the software had to be developed, the price had to come down, and people had to learn how to use the tools and incorporate them into their business processes. AI, on the other hand, runs on the devices we already have, and it uses natural language.’

Essentially he’s saying: we don’t have to wait for an investment roll-out – that’s happened: it’s called the PC and the internet. We just have to stick a bit of very clever but pretty cheap code on top to access these LLMs, and significant productivity gains open up. While this is not true for all AI uses, it is true in areas like professional services and software development.

And a little random sampling at networking events and among colleagues suggests he’s right. As Irving Berlin could have written ‘Everyone’s doing AI now’