The tech industry may seem quiet, plagued by widespread layoffs at major tech companies and a slowing economy, but the air of doom was not evident at a gathering of techies and investors in San Francisco on Tuesday.
However, there is an overriding sense of optimism.
He was there to discuss the latest craze sweeping the tech world: generative artificial intelligence. The technology is known to the wider world through ChatGPT, which has captured the imagination with its ability to generate creative text through written prompts.
Generative AI is a term that describes programs that use artificial intelligence to create new material from complex questions, such as “write a poem about monkeys in the style of Robert Frost” or “create a picture of a panda that is attached to the living room furniture.”
While AI more generally refers to software programs that can make themselves better by “learning” from new data, and which have been used behind the scenes in all kinds of software for years, generative AI is a new spin that’s consumer-facing about that concept.
About 1,000 people from around the world, including AI researchers and content marketers, attended Tuesday’s Gen AI Conference, organized by the startup Jasper. It was a lavish affair, held at Pier 27 on the Embarcadero, overlooking San Francisco Bay.
Attendees turned at the luncheon to complimentary tables and bonne bouche food and sipped coffee from mugs, not the mugs you get at most tech events. In the “Art Experience” room, guests can see computer-generated visuals covering the walls, featuring colorful cityscapes and abstract, morphing shapes.
“To me, it feels like cracking the way Web3 felt in 2021,” said Ken Walton, vice president of growth at Azra Games, which integrates blockchain technology and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz.
“There’s a sense of possibility opening up,” he told CNBC.
Rising interest rates and the resulting digital currency crisis of 2022 wreaked havoc on the tech industry, as venture-backed titans such as FTX and BlockFi imploded and many digital coins lost significant value.
The mood in Silicon Valley and the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area.
Then came ChatGPT, from Microsoft-supported OpenAI startup. The AI software that underlies ChatGPT, a type of machine learning technology known as “big language models,” is not new. But the chat program’s easy-to-use interface means the public can now play with sophisticated software previously restricted to AI researchers and technicians.
Suddenly the tech sector looks interesting again. The venture capital community poured $1.4 billion last year into startups specializing in the technology and has increased its rhetoric.
As Bessemer Venture Partners’ Sameer Dholakia told the audience, generative AI could change “the lives of billions of people.”
Conference organizers Jasper received $125 million in funding in October from investors such as Bessemer, Coatue and IVP. Jasper incorporates technology from OpenAI and others in software that generates promotional copy for marketers, among other uses.
But the field of generative AI is so new, startups are still trying to find the right business use cases and figure out how to make money. As language models like OpenAI’s GPT family of software have gotten better at producing readable text, investors believe that content marketing represents an easy sell.
Conference participants Arshavir Blackwell, machine expert and principal at Arvoinen Consulting, told CNBC that he wants to use generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT to generate more engaging Facebook ads for clients as part of his consulting business. Blackwell said he believes text-generating software has improved so much that advertisers can create promotional copy that resonates with users in ways they never imagined.
Blackwell credits OpenAI and ChatGPT with showing what can be done with generative AI, which is a spotlight on the industry.
“They’re not afraid to take risks,” Blackwell said, noting that AI startups continue to release new software iterations despite a tendency to produce inaccurate information and generate occasional offensive commentary.
At the same time, advances in computing, particularly the evolution of a type of computer chip known as a GPU, have made it easier to develop machine learning software that allows the program to create more realistic text and images.
“Congestion has become computing,” Blackwell said.
However, he notes that this massive AI technology exercise “cost something like $5 million.” Currently, startups such as OpenAI and Stability AI, which develop popular open-source image generation tools, rely on large investors to provide money to create these tools.
During a conference session, Dario Amodei, CEO of AI startup Anthropic, told the audience that companies are getting more comfortable spending money on AI as they see software becoming more capable every day.
Until a year ago, Amodei said, “you could only justify a few million dollars” in an AI project. “People are spending $100 million now,” he said.
However, software that incorporates generative AI can prove to be unwieldy, especially when users perform tasks they don’t want. For example, Microsoft’s recently released experimental chat tool for the Bing search engine has produced strange and sometimes disturbing conversations based on certain prompts.
“The model sometimes attempts to respond or reflect the requested tone to provide a response that may result in an unexpected style,” Microsoft said in a blog post addressing the issue.
This is part of the mystery of developing and using generative AI.
“I’ve never seen technology produced like that, where you put all this data, you have thousands of GPUs, worth $10 million, maybe $100 million, for training, and once you’ve trained. train, you don’t have to know everything we can do,” Amodei told the audience.
As Jai Das, president and partner of Sapphire Ventures, noted on Twitter, “Generative AI is an interesting alternative to content creation, but honestly, the content is boring and generic.”
“Basically, it’s just a tool,” he added in another tweet.
But for one day in San Francisco, generative AI was more than a tool. This is the next leap in computing.
“We knew we were in one of those moments,” Dholakia told the audience. “These are, as we’ve seen before in previous generations, technical leaps forward – like cloud computing, like mobile, like the internet – that fundamentally change the way we operate.”
Meanwhile, while 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 forest, where the trees stand tall and big,
Monkeys roam the land,
With nimble hands and playful eyes,
They talked, jumped, and swung on the vines.
In the midst of the green, he found happiness,
In a world where happiness never ends,
Where every tree is a new playground,
And every fruit is a gift to pursue.
Like a mischievous sprite, he darts and dances,
With apparent joy taking chances,
And in playful, wild abandon,
They seem to laugh at the demands of life.
But, in his eyes, there is wisdom,
A glint knows that underlies,
His behavior, his jokes, and his way of playing,
A sense of life that lasts for days.
So, let’s learn from the fair creatures,
And let our hearts rise to the air,
With the spirit of play, like a wild monkey,
In a happy, free and light world.
Watch: Charlie Munger weighs in on ChatGPT3.