What is Metacognition and Why Bill Gates Sees It as the Next Frontier of Artificial Intelligence

There artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the fields of technology which showed faster progress during the last years.

Currently, different systems that allow you to generate everything from text and images to music and videos .

This is possible thanks to store large amounts of data that they can make available to users.

However, Generative AI can also make mistakes and invent information This seems true at first glance.

Although some programs can be very useful if you take them into consideration, There are still fundamental aspects that distance it from the work that human beings could do. .

This is where it comes in. the concept of metacognition in the context of AI, a term he referred to Bill Gates in a recent interview with the podcast Next Big Idea Club.

But before delving into what this means in this area, it is necessary to review its definition at a more general level .

A Cambridge University paper describes that The prefix “meta” means “about” the thing itself .

Metacognition would therefore be “cognition about cognition” or “the thought of one’s own thought.”

This has two dimensions: one includes what one knows about his own cognitive skills and the other is based on how he controls his learning processes .

In the context of AI, the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder suggested on the show that Metacognition will be the next level of systems working with this technology .

As Gates explained, the concept is related to the ability to “think about a problem in a broad sense, step back and say, ‘Okay, how important is this? How could I verify my answer, and what external tools could help me?’” .

From his point of view, even if progress has been made, Today’s big models still don’t have the ability to stop production and evaluate the work they do. .

Alright, constantly generate a response .

Gates believes that such advances in metacognition in AI systems will help make them more “intelligent” and precise in the results they deliver .

“This is the great frontier” ” Gates stressed.

The development of metacognition in this area as well This would be the key to general artificial intelligence (AGI, for its acronym in English).

Generally speaking, the latter seeks to create a software with self-learning ability in the same way as human beings.

The aim of this is who can perform tasks for which he is not necessarily trained .