Bill Gates published an op-ed on Tuesday saying that the artificial intelligence (AI) technology behind tools like ChatGPT could be as revolutionary as the graphical user interface was in 1980. The graphical user interface was the prototype to modern operating systems like Windows and Mac. Now, Gates says AI will lead to all sorts of similarly massive changes in the coming decades. "The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone," he wrote. "It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other."

Jürgen, it's a privilege to have you here as one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and, more specifically, deep learning--its hottest field right now. Before you go into all of those fields, we would like to understand the person Jürgen Schmidhuber better. Perhaps you can tell us a few things that you're particularly proud of in your career. One of the things I'm proud of: I think I understand what it means to be curious and how to implement curiosity, which I think is essential to build agents that learn from experience through their own self-generated experiments. Agents who are motivated to invent, in a directed way, action sequences or experiments that lead to data that tell them something about how the world works that they didn't know yet.

Jürgen, it's a privilege to have you here as one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and, more specifically, deep learning--its hottest field right now. Before you go into all of those fields, we would like to understand the person Jurgen Schmidhuber better. Perhaps you can tell us a few things that you're particularly proud of in your career. One of the things I'm proud of: I think I understand what it means to be curious and how to implement curiosity, which I think is essential to build agents that learn from experience through their own self-generated experiments. Agents who are motivated to invent, in a directed way, action sequences or experiments that lead to data that tell them something about how the world works that they didn't know yet.

Humans are probably not the greatest intelligences in the universe. Earth is a relatively young planet and the oldest civilizations could be billions of years older than us. But even on Earth, Homo sapiens may not be the most intelligent species for that much longer. The world Go, chess, and Jeopardy champions are now all AIs. AI is projected to outmode many human professions within the next few decades. And given the rapid pace of its development, AI may soon advance to artificial general intelligence--intelligence that, like human intelligence, can combine insights from different topic areas and display flexibility and common sense. From there it is a short leap to superintelligent AI, which is smarter than humans in every respect, even those that now seem firmly in the human domain, such as scientific reasoning and social skills.