The tech industry may seem like it’s suffering from widespread layoffs at major tech companies and a down economy, but the air of doom wasn’t evident at a gathering of techies and investors in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Instead, there was a widespread sense of optimism.
They were there to discuss the latest craze capturing the tech world’s attention: Generative Artificial Intelligence. This technology is known to the larger world through ChatGPT, which has captured imaginations with its ability to generate creative text through written prompts.
Generative AI is a catch-all term describing programs that use artificial intelligence to create new content from complex questions, such as “Write a poem about monkeys in the style of Robert Frost” or “Look at the living room furniture.” Draw an image of a draped panda.”
While AI more generally refers to software programs that can improve themselves by “learning” from new data, and which has been used behind the scenes in all kinds of software for years, a fresh consumer take on the generative AI concept – Facing is spin.
Nearly 1,000 people from around the world, including AI researchers and content marketers, attended Tuesday’s General AI conference, which was organized by startup Jasper. It was a grand ceremony, held at Pier 27 on the Embarcadero overlooking the San Francisco Bay.
Attendees enjoyed free farm-to-table lunches and bonne bouche dishes and sipped their coffee from mugs, not disposable cups as at most tech events. In the “Art Experience” room, guests can zone out while staring at the computer-generated visuals that cover the walls, featuring multicolored cityscapes and abstract, morphing shapes.
“I feel like this is breaking through the way Web3 felt in 2021,” said Ken Walton, vice president of development for Azra Games.
“There’s a sense of wide open possibility,” he told CNBC.
Rising interest rates and the resulting cryptocurrency meltdown of 2022 hurt the tech industry, as venture-backed titans like FTX and BlockFi imploded and many digital coins lost significant value.
The mood in Silicon Valley and the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area was somber.
Then came ChatGPT, from MicrosoftSupported Startup OpenAI. The underlying AI software powering ChatGPT, a type of machine-learning technique known as a “large language model,” is not new. But the chatting program’s simple-to-use interface meant the public could now play with cutting-edge software that had previously been limited to AI researchers and technical experts.
Suddenly the tech sector was looking exciting again. venture capital community inserted Startups specializing in the technology raised $1.4 billion last year, and the rhetoric escalated.
As Sameer Dholakia of Bessemer Venture Partners told audience members, generative AI could change “the lives of billions of people.”
Conference organizer Jasper gets $125 million Grant from investors such as Bessemer, Coteau and IVP in October. Jasper incorporates technologies from OpenAI and others into its software which produces promotional copy for marketers, among other uses.
But the field of generative AI is so new, startups are still trying to discover suitable business use cases and figure out how to make money. Because language models such as OpenAI’s GPT family of software have become much better at producing readable text, investors believe that content marketing represents an easy sell.
conference attendee Arshveer Blackwell, a machine learning expert and principal at Arvoinen Consulting, told CNBC that he’s interested in using generative AI techniques like ChatGPT to create more compelling Facebook ads for clients as part of his consulting business. Blackwell said he believes text-producing software has improved so much that it may be possible for advertisers to come up with promotional copy that resonates with users in ways they hadn’t imagined.
Blackwell credits OpenAI and ChatGPT for showing people what’s possible with generative AI, shining a light on the industry at large.
“They weren’t afraid to take risks,” Blackwell said, noting that the AI startup continued to roll out new iterations of the software despite its tendency to generate misinformation and the occasional offensive comment.
Also, advances in computing, especially the development of a type of computer chip known as a GPU, have made it easier to develop machine-learning software that lets these programs create more realistic text and images.
“The bottleneck has been computing,” Blackwell said.
Still, he notes that training these large-scale AI technologies “costs like $5 million.” For now, startups like OpenAI and Stability AI, which developed a popular open-source image-generating tool, depend on large investors to provide them with the funding to build their tools.
During a conference session, Dario Amodi, CEO of AI startup Anthropic, told audience members that companies are becoming more comfortable spending a lot of cash on AI as they see software becoming more capable every day.
Until a year ago, Amodei said, “you can only justify a few million dollars” on AI projects. “People are spending $100 million now,” he said.
Still, software incorporating generative AI can prove overwhelming, especially when users make it perform tasks it was not intended to do. For example, Microsoft’s recently released experimental chat tool for its Bing search engine is producer Bizarre and sometimes disturbing conversations based on certain cues.
“The model sometimes tries to respond in or reflect the tone in which it is being asked to respond, which can lead to a style we didn’t intend,” Microsoft said in a statement. ” blog post Who addressed the defeat.
This is part of the secret to the development and use of Generative AI.
“I’ve never seen a technology that’s produced like this where on the one hand where you put all this data, you’ve got thousands of GPUs, it costs $10 million, maybe $100 million, to train it, And once you’ve trained it, you don’t necessarily know everything it can do,” Amodei told attendees.
As Jai Das, President and Partner at Neelam Ventures, noted On Twitter, “Generative AI is an interesting option for content creation, but let’s be honest, the content is pretty boring and generic.”
“Actually, it’s just a tool,” he added in another do,
But for one day in San Francisco, generative AI was more than just a tool. This was the next leap in computing.
“We know we’re in one of those moments,” Dholakia told attendees. “This is, as we’ve seen in previous generations, a technological leap forward — like cloud computing, like mobile, like the Internet — that fundamentally changes the way we work.”
In the meantime, as tech enthusiasts and investors debate its importance, we can enjoy the results, such as ChatGPT’s attempt to write a poem about monkeys in the style of Robert Frost:
In the woods, where the trees stand tall and majestic,
A herd of monkeys roams the country,
With nimble hands and playful eyes,
They chatter, jump and swing on vines.
They find their fun among the greenery,
In a world where there is no joy,
Where every tree is a new playground,
And a prize for every fruit chased.
Like mischievous sprites, they dart and dance,
With a joy that seems to be a chance,
And in their playful, wild abandon,
They seem to laugh at the demands of life.
Yet, in their eyes, lies a wisdom,
a knowing radiance that lies within,
their antics, pranks, and playful ways,
A sense of life that lasts for days.
So let’s know the fair from these creatures,
and let our hearts breathe air,
With fickle souls, like wild monkeys,
In a world that is happy, free and gentle.