In the years since, the wave of investments from companies large and small has spread facial recognition around the worldinstalled always listen virtual assistant enter the house and see AI technology become indispensable about all utilities, applications and services.
The race is now on to find innovative AI applications that will make their mark on the world. One of the early successes was Microsoft’s Copilot, can code for a given task and costs $10 per month. The other is Jasperprovides automated document generation services for companies to use blog posts, marketing copy and emails. Last week, the company announced that it had raised $125 million in funding from investors valuing the company at $1.5 billion and claims to be on track to bring $75 million in sales This year.
Both Microsoft and Jasper are built on leading services from OpenAIan AI company started as a non-profit organization with sponsorship from Elon Musk and other technological lights. It pioneered text generation, starting in 2019 with an algorithm called GPT-2. At the end of 2021, it opened a a more powerful commercial successor, known as GPT-3, for anyone to use.
OpenAI also started the recent surge in interest in AI image generation by announcing a tool called DALL-E in January 2021 that can generate raw images for text prompts. The second version, DALL-E 2, released in April 2022, renderable more complex and complex pictures, demonstrating how rapidly technology has evolved. Several companies, including stable AI, now offer Similar tools for creating images.
Of course, the Silicon Valley hype may be ahead of reality. “Have a lot of FOMO“Nathan Benaich, an investor at Airport capital and author of “Status of AI,” an annual report that tracks technology and business trends. He says Adobe acquires Figmone, a $20 billion, collaborative design tool, created a sense of rich opportunity in reinventing creative tools. Benaich is looking at several companies exploring the use of artificial intelligence for protein synthesis or chemistry. “It’s pretty crazy right now – people are talking about it,” he said.
Joanne Chena partner at Establishment capital and an early investor in Jasper, said it was still difficult to turn an innovative AI tool into a valuable company. Jasper’s founders have gone to great lengths to refine the product to meet customer needs and tastes, but she believes the technology can have many uses, she said.
Chen also said the rush of AI means regulation has yet to catch up with some of the bad or dangerous uses it might find. She worries about how AI tools can be abused, such as to create video spreading misinformation. “What interests me most is how we think about security and false and fake content,” she said.
Other uncertainties about AI raise legal questions. Amir Ghavi, a partner at law firm Fried Frank, says he’s been receiving a flurry of inquiries lately from companies looking to leverage the technology. They have struggled with issues such as the legal impact of using models that can be trained on copyrighted material, like images pulled from the web.
Some artists have complained that Image generators threaten to undermine human creativity. Shutterstock, a stock image provider, this week announced that it will offer an image creation service powered by OpenAI but will also launch a fund that pays the creators of the images the company uses. licensed as training material for AI models. Ghavi said using copyrighted material to train AI models most likely falls under fair use, making it exempt from copyright law, but added that he expects that to be checked. investigation in court.
The open legal questions and potential misuse of innovative AI are unlikely to slow investor interest. Their enthusiasm evokes Silicon Valley’s former frenzy for crypto and social apps. And the technology at the heart of this hype cycle can help keep speculative flywheels spinning.
Venture capital firm Sequoia Capital has discovered the potential of artificial intelligence in a blog post last month, across fields such as speech synthesis, video editing, biology, and chemistry. A postscript at the bottom notes that all images and some text, including future use cases for fusion algorithms, were generated using AI.
