How OpenAI Democratized a Whole New Area of Artificial Intelligence.
This American company has introduced the general public to generative AI, capable of creating text and images.
A tool to generate professional quality illustration images from a simple text description. A software capable of conducting a realistic conversation, writing a biography, writing lines of computer code, answering a university exam, or composing the lyrics of a song in any language.
The opening of the Dall-E (image) and ChatGPT (text) artificial intelligence tools to everyone will have been one of the great tech events of 2022.
These two technically bluff platforms will have put the words “generative artificial intelligence” on everyone’s lips. These are algorithms capable of creating new content, textual or visual, after ingesting and digesting huge masses of already existing content. ChatGPT “knows” how to adopt the right language register to write an administrative letter. Dall-E “knows” how to represent a car and the Art Deco style. This tool has already been used by 3 million people and generates 4 million images per day, while ChatGPT has fed many speculations about the threat it would pose to certain jobs, or about the difficulties that await teachers to spot exam papers written by this artificial intelligence…
These two generative AIs were created by the American company OpenAI.
The latter was founded in 2015 with an altruistic goal: to help develop artificial intelligence capable of replicating the functioning of the human brain, and that benefits humanity. The company was initially funded to the tune of $1 billion by Elon Musk (who has since stepped away), LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, entrepreneur Peter Thiel and the president of prestigious startup incubator Y Combinator, Sam Altman.
These discoveries were originally intended to be open source, meaning freely available to other companies. These ideals have evolved. A nonprofit, OpenAI changed its status in 2019 to a capped for-profit company. This means that only a portion of its profits can be returned to investors, who will not be able to recoup more than one hundred times its initial stake. OpenAI justified this change by the need to attract capital to continue its research. As a result, Microsoft took a stake in the company with an investment of $1 billion.
Microsoft as a partner
OpenAI is now using the Azure cloud to host its compute-intensive services. In exchange, Microsoft has the priority to incorporate technologies from OpenAI into its products. This is how the search engine Bing or the Microsoft Designer software now integrates the Dall-E image generation tool.
“We will see in 2023 advances in artificial intelligence that we didn’t think we would see until 2033. This is going to be extremely important for the future of Microsoft, but also the future of everyone,” says its president, Brad Smith.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft could soon be back in the pot. OpenAI is currently valued at $20 billion. According to Reuters, the company has told potential investors that it is aiming for $200 million in revenues in 2023 and $1 billion in 2024.
Because if its technologies can be reused by other developers, it is not free. It is possible to integrate Dall-E into any service, but the generation of a high-definition image is charged to the company 2 cents per unit. 20,000 words written by ChatGPT cost one cent.
This text technology is used by the start-up Jasper, which publishes a tool to help write marketing content for social networks, company blogs, promotional emails, etc. Jasper, which has 80,000 customers, is expected to generate $80 million in revenue by 2022. It raised $125 million in October 2022.
Other companies working on generative AI are attracting capital. Stability AI, for example, raised $101 million for its Stable Diffusion tool, which creates images from text. This platform is itself used by the application Lensa, which caused a sensation at the end of the year with its automated generation of larger-than-life selfies, sold for $6 per fifty shots…
A whole ecosystem of services is thus being set up. “There are many entrepreneurs who are creating start-ups based on these technologies,” said an analyst from the fund Unusual Ventures to the media outlet Pitchbook. About fifty seed capital raises have already taken place in the United States since the fall of 2022.
After the Metaverse or Web3, will artificial generative intelligence be the magic word of 2023 to attract funding?
Investors could keep their checkbooks in their pockets until the legal risks have been clarified. Because these technologies open up a whole new field of intellectual property law: to learn to write and draw, these AIs had to train on the work of artists and authors. Do we have the right to commercialize these synthetic creations? Can artists refuse to feed the workings of these AIs? The debate is still far from over.
Some reading
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s Artificial Intelligence, Is Causing a Stir on the Internet, but These Real-World Use Cases Remain to Be Tested. It remains to be seen whether the rising star of the AI will be anything more than a shooting star.
American Politics Is Dominated by Seniors: Has America Become a Gerontocracy? Presidency, Senate, Congress… In the United States, the organs of power reflect less and less the society.
Can Central Banks Like the Fed or the ECB Go Bankrupt? The monetary institutes, trapped by their rate hikes, start losing money.
Legalized in 2018, Sports Betting Will Bring In Nearly $7B in Tax Revenue to America by 2022. The $100 billion mark in wagers will be passed for the first time.
More Powerful Than Ever, Elon Musk Will Also Have Appeared Much More Erratic, Provocative, and Therefore Worrying in 2022. Time’s Man of the Year in 2021, Elon Musk now worries politicians and investors of all stripes. What can we expect from him in 2023?