AI Breakthroughs

 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

AI that makes images: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2023

AI models that generate stunning imagery from simple phrases are evolving into powerful creative and commercial tools.

By Will Douglas Heaven, January 9, 2023

OpenAI, Stability AI, Midjourney, Google

   introduced a world of weird and wonderful mash-ups when its text-to-image model DALL-E was released in 2021. Type in a short description of pretty much anything, and the program spat out a picture of what you asked for in seconds. DALL-E 2, unveiled in April 2022, was a massive leap forward. Google also launched its own image-making AI, called Imagen https://imagen.research.google/ . 

Yet the biggest game-changer was Stable Diffusion   https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-public-release , an open-source text-to-image model released for free by UK-based startup Stability AI in August. Not only could Stable Diffusion produce some of the most stunning images yet, but it was designed to run on a (good) home computer.

By making text-to-image models accessible to all, Stability AI poured fuel on what was already an inferno of creativity and innovation. Millions of people have created tens of millions of images in just a few months. But there are problems, too. Artists are caught in the middle of one of the biggest upheavals in a decade https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/16/1059598/this-artist-is-dominating-ai-generated-art-and-hes-not-happy-about-it/ . And, just like language models, text-to-image generators can amplify the biased and toxic associations buried in training data scraped from the internet.

The tech is now being built into commercial software, such as Photoshop. Visual-effects artists and video-game studios are exploring how it can fast-track development pipelines. And text-to-image technology has already advanced to text-to-video https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/29/1060472/meta-text-to-video-ai/  . The AI-generated video clips demoed by Google, Meta, and others in the last few months are only seconds long, but that will change. One day movies could be made just by feeding a script into a computer.

Nothing else in AI grabbed people’s attention more last year—for the best and worst reasons. Now we wait to see what lasting impact these tools will have on creative industries—and the entire field of AI.

No one knows where the rise of generative AI will leave us. Read more here.

Top AI Breakthrough Highlights

From O'Reilly: 

Top AI breakthroughs you need to know
Abigail Hing Wen discusses some of the most exciting recent breakthroughs in AI and robotics.
By Abigail Hing Wen 

This is a keynote highlight from the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference in Beijing 2019. Watch the full version of this keynote on the O'Reilly online learning platform.

You can also see other highlights from the event.

Abigail Hing Wen is head of emerging tech for the Office of the CTO of AI Products at Intel. At Intel Capital, she partners closely with investors on AI investments and has worked with over 100 Silicon Valley startups from incorporation to acquisition or IPO. She advises board members, and writes and speaks on AI and venture capital at international conferences. (See her articles "Fortune on AI & Privacy" and "Forbes on AI and Bias" and highlights from her talk at Hub.Berlin.) She previously practiced law at Sullivan & Cromwell and worked on Ca..  ... "