Generative AI: A Creative New World
sequoiacap.com
sequoiacap.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo...
Sequoia coming into AI now, with the same kind of grandiose proclamations doesn't sit well.
Although, I'll remain skeptical of anything brought to us by the same Sequoia who also wrote a breathless SBF puff-piece that aged like fine milk: https://web.archive.org/web/20220922164619/https://www.sequo...
As VCs gain more traction and became more accessible (on social media, esp), it only serves to their detriment when they make a mistake, even if it is a honest one. I don't think VCs care that much, tbh, given the power imbalance that having that much money brings.
As massive VCs are starting to take note, it's starting to feel a bit like the crypto scene. Interesting tech without much real-world application.
If done right, image generation and augmentation could be a powerful and valuable feature.
a few in the community are diving deep on game assets: https://twitter.com/emmanuel_2m
Yes, it is going to happen quickly. As long as the immature pornographers can be kept at bay. There is far more revenue in advertising than jerking off, porno morons.
FYI: I created a feature film quality actor replacement system aimed at Personalized Advertising over a decade ago with an earlier version of this generative AI technology. But investors (both VC and angels) could only see porn as a viable application, while I offered presentation after presentation of how Personalized Advertising is a holy grail of advertising revenues. Perhaps it will happen this time. Immaturity can only last so long, right? Maybe?
A further balkanization of reality.
https://twitter.com/rainisto/status/1597206841813274626?t=7B...
The future is going to be a mish-mash of the past?
If everyone can just run their own prompt against free models, wouldn't it be more likely that no one pays for it anymore?
while SD is freely downloadable, it isn't energetically free to run inference,
so for example (and as an off the cuff speculation), opportunities could arise to provide execution of these models from places where the cost of energy is lower
we can never confidently predict what the business models will be when such an impressive new technology arises.
To provide some perspective here, SD can be retrained on comparably small samples to generate images for very specific needs (example see [1]). So there is certainly a bunch of $ to be harvested by generating very good training sets for industry needs, say for instance mockups in architecture, creating logos and brand styles or just nice looking designs for consumer products.
[1] https://lambdalabs.com/blog/how-to-fine-tune-stable-diffusio...
But with improvements to the models I can see it fitting into a "integrated into professional creative tooling" business model. Generate a rough "first draft" based on a prompt and edit. It simultaneously keeps a human in the loop to filter some of the model's zanier outputs, makes sure the output coheres with some design vision, and also people using these features professionally are much more likely to actually pay for what will be fairly expensive-to-operate features.
I'm excited about generative models, buuuuut I will echo the other thoughts here re: VC hype. The last cycle of VC investments turned out to be full of hot air and no substance. The kind of hype around generative models feels a lot like crypto: lots of breathless excitement combined with few details. We are simply being promised that this technology will usher in some kind of golden era but nobody can seem to point to killer use cases. There's so much hand-waving around actual applications that it threatens to generate a hurricane from the sheer amount of air being displaced.
As someone who works in the AI/ML field I've explored this stuff and it's definitely promising for some use cases and can potentially be transformative for some niches, but I do not see this as world-transformative at this point and considering where said breathless hypeness is coming from I'd encourage caution in over-exuberance.
[edit] My sincere hope for this new cycle of tech hype is that we actually create some businesses of worth. I do not expect this to come from VC-world, who seem to have spent the last decade building wholly incompetent businesses and foisting them on public investors (or in the case of crypto and ICOs, just fleecing retail investors directly).
My hope is that developers can actually use these models to do valuable things that people will pay for, as opposed to shovel yet more money into yet more furnaces to prop up absurd valuations around comparably tiny revenue.
for non-photorealistic work, or if it becomes virtually indistinguishable from photography, how would you know whether an image was expensively sourced from a human artists/photographer or cheaply generated by an AI? how would we enforce copyrights in relation to AI if anyone can lie and claim "oh yeah, i paid a wetware neural net to do that, no problem.."?
in particular, the argument that "ai generated works is not copyrightable" in support of it being untenable to use it for business purposes is challenged by the observation that "we won't be able to tell where it came from anyway"
You won't be able to if you look solely at the output. There are ways to check audit and verify the process by which said output was produced. They are also gamable but the cost of gaming them is not insignificant.
i think this is the scenario in question, if someone is lying about the source of an image
> There are ways to check audit and verify the process by which said output was produced. They are also gamable but the cost of gaming them is not insignificant.
this is interesting to know about. do you have some zero knowledge proof arrangement in mind here?
- i've worked for a company which acquired its art content from a foreign outsourcing business.
- the foreign outsourcing business of course hired human artists, albeit at much lower wages than is possible where the company i worked for was located.
- the company i worked for launched a product containing this art content and never encountered a copyright challenge.
if AI eventually produces content indistinguishable from what humans can produce, what prevents these foreign outsourcing businesses from quietly pretending they still hire humans? the true origin of the content can be trivially "laundered".
>if AI eventually produces content indistinguishable from what humans can produce, what prevents these foreign outsourcing businesses from quietly pretending they still hire humans?
The fact that they don't and if it is discovered, it will mean all of the work generated by them is not copyrightable and therefore everyone is free to copy it. They'd also have to lie to the copyright office and the businesses they were selling their services. The only thing doing the work here is the lie.
Right now I can go to another place and find another photographer who will recreate something for less. Technology might make that more trivial, but it doesn't change the fact that as a business opportunity it'd only work by having to massively misrepresent oneself.
Ostensibly, if I was a business and I was contracting these kinds of services, one thing guaranteed to be in the contract would be a clause that they authored the works, obtained the copyrights, etc, lawfully. And generally in a contract they would represent what the business represents (we are an illustration shop that sells images that we authored... etc).
So to more specifically answer your question - "what would stop them?" the same exact repercussions as would right now (which is what I intended to make clear in my initial response to you).
you and i have extremely different impressions of how effective regulatory repercussions are at actually constraining behaviour.
circumventing laws and regulations really does do a lot of the work in the economy. vast amounts of plagiarised code run in software we touch every day. artistic work gets crudely lifted. i don't see something as powerful as ai content generation being constrained by dictums about what can be copyrighted.
And they can be narrowed in focus.
You will see:
Animated series generated from words and text, no labour needed. Just make the characters, the base models, a few demos. South Park has a staff to do all the animation - no more - now they'll just tweak a few things.
You will see some amazing, raw creative stories come out of this that are going to be entertaining in ways we haven't fathomed. That may be a bit of a meme.
I suggest it may fundamentally alter low-grade creative content. Basically, second tier fiction I think will be a total commodity. So cheezy romance novels, fantasy - I'll bet in 10 years AI is as good as most mediocre authors.
They are already generating news articles. Bloomberg has an AI creating articles. Basically to 'verbalize and organize facts'.
One thing coming I think nobody is talking about is lighting and it will change everything. Lighting on set is a massive pain, everything revolves around it. Being able to use AI for lighting will change production costs dramatically.
Please Sequoia, for we are only knaves, let us play
Since the postscript mentions that the article was co-written by GPT-3, perhaps this is one of the generated lines? :)
(compared to the prior SOTA for generative ML in images i.e. GANs, diffusion models use far more compute-heavy and are much slower!)
Sure, Sequoia wants to hear all about your great startup proposals.
And it will (rightly) reject 99%, and finally fund a "known team that can execute" kidding not kidding
I'm doing vocals! Can't wait for the seams to come together.
“In 3-8 years we'll have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. The machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable.” —Marvin Minsky, 1970
Well, they do start with the delusional "copilot writes 40% of your code" microsoft marketing bullshit which everyone who has ever used it knows is not true, so it really is "garbage in, garbage out".
> We also generated illustrations for this post with Midjourney
Something about the writing style is just off.
GPT-3 can generate pretty convincing anti-AI copypasta.
- GPT-3
"Copilot is generatin 40% of code in projects where it is installed" - is that any true, to start with something? What are these kind of projects?
What utter bull - at a time when inflation is on the rise (7-14%), you aren't going to unlock ANY market potential, in fact you are going to shrink the market, significantly.
Prepare for impending market collapse and massive market failure...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/225698/monthly-inflation...
If you are so good at seeing the future, you should be the richest person on earth. Surely there's a way to short the market.
Investors go long and capture the outsized returns. The narrative and potential of AI/ML is incredible. It stands to be as disruptive as smartphones and the internet were.
As for your thesis on the current economic picture, much of the market still thinks there's an easy out just around the corner. You can make a bet on that and find out.