WHEN OPENAI REVEALED CHATGPT in late 2022, people clambered to test it. They asked complicated, open-ended questions, requested long-form narrative, and often got impressive results. Not even four months later, the company released GPT-4, the next generation of its AI software, which can respond to both image and text inputs and more nuanced instructions.
Even before ChatGPT came along, text-to-image generators like Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 stunned people by responding to written prompts with photorealistic images. ‘Two kangaroos waltzing in the style of Monet’ would get you pretty much that. Not surprisingly, arguments over the ethics of mimicking artists’ styles, legal risks and the impact on people’s livelihoods have flared.
While the impact on the art industry is clear, many leaders in other fields continue to view these tools as a mere novelty. That is a mistake, and in this article I will explain why.
A Step Change in AI
It all began in 2017 with a landmark innovation in AI model architecture by Google researchers who developed transformer architecture. Since then, tech companies and researchers have been supersizing AI, increasing the size of models by 10,000 times and the size of training sets, too. The result: powerful, pretrained models — called ‘foundation models’ — that offerunprecedented adaptability within the domains they are trained on, be it language, images or the structure of proteins.
With this adaptability, foundation models can complete a wide variety of tasks without needing task-specific training. What’s more, companies building foundation models are giving third parties access through application programming interfaces (APIs) or by open sourcing them, putting these advanced models in anyone’s hands. This is no everyday technology advancement.
While foundation models are not the only area of AI research that is growing, the magnitude of their potential and the speed at which they can be deployed is driving them to the top of companies’ innovation agendas. Indeed, 98 per cent of global executives we surveyed agree that AI foundation models will play an important role in their
