This A.I technology is booming and for all the right reasons

Artificial intelligence (AI) is growing fast. In the last couple of years, we've seen AI be used to automate tasks like customer support, fraud detection and language translation. But until recently, AI has primarily sought to analyze and understand data that already exists. With the rise of generative AI, AI is now creating content and models from scratch. For example, instead of just using AI to find optimal keywords for an internet article, companies are now able to create an entire, coherent article from beginning to end. Generative A.I seems to be on the rescue. Generative A.I is booming for all the right reasons.

My proximity to this emerging technology has shown me just how much opportunity Generative AI has to transform business. Its capabilities span countless industries as businesses use it to create entirely new content such as articles, musical compositions, art, graphics, podcasts and even videos. With the ability to create something from scratch, Generative AI is catalyzing the next wave of artificial intelligence. Investors, pundits and journalists have talked up artificial intelligence for years, but the new wave — the result of more than a decade of research — represents a more powerful and more mature breed of A.I.

This type of A.I. promises to reinvent everything from online search engines like Google to photo and graphics editors like Photoshop to digital assistants like Alexa and Siri. Ultimately, it could provide a new way of interacting with almost any software, letting people chat with computers and other devices as if they were chatting with another person.

That has sent deal-making around generative A.I. companies into overdrive. Jasper, a generative A.I. start-up founded in 2021, raised $125 million in October, valuing it at $1.5 billion. Stability AI, an image generating company founded in 2020, raised $101 million that same month, valuing it at $1 billion. Smaller generative A.I. companies, including Character.AI, Replika and You.com, have also been inundated with investor interest.

In 2022, investors pumped at least $1.37 billion into generative A.I. companies across 78 deals, almost as much as they invested in the previous five years combined, according to data from PitchBook, which tracks financial activity across the industry.

Recent advancements in Generative AI

2022 has become the year that Generative AI really came on the map, but the technology has been around for several years. It first became popular in 2014 when generative adversarial networks (GANs) were developed to create realistic images from noise maps. In 2017, however, we were introduced to the transformer, which is the deep learning architecture that underlies large language models (LLMs) that can read, summarize and translate texts to generate sentences from scratch. The transformer rendered AI capable of generating text, software code and protein structures, significantly leveling up its capabilities.

When most people think of Generative AI, they think of OpenAI's image generator DALL-E. An early version of DALL-E used the transformer to create images from text, but this soon made way for Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) in 2021. This technique was used in conjunction with diffusion in DALLE-2, which was able to create even higher-resolution images with spectacular details. DALLE-2 made an incredible leap to picture-perfect images you would be hard-pressed to believe weren't man-made.

Conclusion 

AI is the next frontier for many technologists, so it is worth keeping an eye on this development. There are endless possibilities with the way that AI can be used, and we could see new industries growing from this form of intelligence in the coming years.