4 ms·

Interesting that the large company AI products (this, Microsoft copilot, etc) are so much more compelling than any of the startups I’ve seen. Makes me think th

Interesting that the large company AI products (this, Microsoft copilot, etc) are so much more compelling than any of the startups I’ve seen. Makes me think that we haven’t seen what true innovation looks like in this space. Right now, AI is a feature, not a product. Edit: Not talking about the models themselves (stability, mid journey, GPT-x), talking about what is built on those models.

l33tman 4y ago
I would consider both Stable Diffusion and MidJourney to be startups and both are better by far than the established companies like OpenAI, and there are dozens of LLMs soon catching up with GPT3/4. As you say, it will be a very interesting next 6-12 months..
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  I played around (till free account expired) with MidJourney and what one can produce out of blue is mind-boggling. Indie devs can with a bit of effort generate much of their art via this for peanuts (the only problem may be consistency from what I've seen, basically every image is like from another artist, even in same batch)
  - GaggiX 4y ago
    The biggest problem is that you can't do much if not conditioning the generation with your prompt and maybe image embeddings, if you are an indie dev you would probably find much more useful Stable Diffusion.
  - chillfox 4y ago
    If you control the --chaos --stylize and --seed then you can get more consistent results.
- Kye 4y ago
  Stable Diffusion is a thing you can run on your computer for free and train models for. It's from a research university. Is this one of those more expansive definitions of startup?
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    Presumably he means stability.ai is a startup.
  - l33tman 4y ago
    Stability AI who trained Stable Diffusion is a $100M startup. See https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stability-ai https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stability-ai
- andybak 4y ago
  Dall-E is still ahead of the competition for some tasks. Midjourney has a very polished look but it lacks the depth of understanding that Dall-E can manage. I regularly hit prompts that I need to jump into Dall-E for.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    For playing around, sure. For serious work though you probably need control-net in some way, otherwise you end up with a bunch of images which are great on their own but make no sense together.
  - l33tman 4y ago
    Yeah, but text understanding is just one part of the "product" in this space nowadays. If you look at all the modes and features a GUI around SD can do now (like AUTOMATIC1111's) and compare to what you can do at the DALLE2 webpage it's night and day.
- motoxpro 4y ago
  I wouldnt consider stable diffusion, mid journey and Open AI products. Little bit too low level, they seem to be more platforms that the products are built on. Not to say they aren’t amazing, just that the productized versions (one level up) are being executed really well by the big companies.
ghaff 4y ago
In Adobe's case, it absolutely makes sense it would be a feature of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere. They've been adding various "smart" masking features and the like over time already.
tensor 4y ago
Microsoft is just licensing their technology from OpenAI, which is still a small company, if not still a startup.
- motoxpro 4y ago
  ChatGPT is not nearly as good of a product as what was demoed by Microsoft if you want to make that comparison. Not talking about LLMs/underlying model. I don’t think adobe makes their own either. Talking about the interface to it.
  - jmknoll 4y ago
    What MS demo are you referring to? I like chatgpt way more than new Bing’s GPT interface.
    - motoxpro 4y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf-dbS9CcRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf-dbS9CcRU
      - jmknoll 4y ago
        Thank you. I hadn’t seen that. That is indeed pretty impressive.
  - random_cynic 4y ago
    Without the underlying model what's the point of the facade?
    - motoxpro 4y ago
      GPT-3 had been out for almost a year before ChatGPT and no one cared
      - jmknoll 4y ago
time_to_smile 4y ago
> AI is a feature, not a product Part of the reason for this is that very often the best applications of AI are really invisible to the user, making everything a little bit better, quietly behind the scenes. The same is true for software in general. The best software products automate loads of stuff behind the scenes so from the user perspective they just click a button and the thing they want to happen, happens. Perhaps the most successful and important AI product is a great example of this: the spam filter. I bet most younger email users don't even realize how much value this old AI tool provides them unseen. But the trouble is making effective AI products is not "sexy" right now, and if your team ships one it won't get any credit in a big company. I've had my PM instantly shoot down plenty of interesting applications of AI that wouldn't be very visible to the customer or larger product-org.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  I don't fundamentally disagree, but if spam filters are "AI" then my bloody toaster is also artificially intelligent.
  - time_to_smile 4y ago
    You must have a smarter toaster than I do. My toaster is a completely deterministic mechanism that knows nothing about my past toasting experience, nor makes any inference about future toast. A spam filter: - Is provided historic information about the problem - Learns from this information to construct a basic model of language - Is then provided unseen information - Then makes a probabilistic decision based on a degree of uncertainty. The exact model behind the spam filtering can be extremely simple (naive Bayes) but could easily (and probably will without you even realizing it) expand to include things like GPT. A spam filter is making decisions under uncertainty with new information based on patterns it learned from previous information. If this doesn't fit your definition of "AI" then I think if you understood what was happening under the hood I don't think you would consider GPT to be AI either. If you toaster does learn your toast preference over time from your toasting behavior (unlike mine) then I would consider that AI as well.
    - 4y ago
MrScruff 4y ago
Isn’t almost everything on this page concept stuff though? Seems like the only thing they’re shipping is text to image and the results they show look pretty underwhelming. Seems like all these big companies are pushing amazing looking concept videos more than anything.
- jamilton 4y ago
  Yeah, I thought it was funny that most of the page is "in the future...". Guess they're trying to get attention for the product before it's ready and gauge interest/response.
akira2501 4y ago
> Interesting that the large company AI products (this, Microsoft copilot, etc) are so much more compelling than any of the startups I’ve seen. This is an indicative signal. It's amazing how easily it is ignored. > Makes me think that we haven’t seen what true innovation looks like in this space. It's interesting that a bunch of product add-ons could be considered "innovation" in the first place.

l33tman 4y ago

I would consider both Stable Diffusion and MidJourney to be startups and both are better by far than the established companies like OpenAI, and there are dozens of LLMs soon catching up with GPT3/4. As you say, it will be a very interesting next 6-12 months..

saiya-jin 4y ago
I played around (till free account expired) with MidJourney and what one can produce out of blue is mind-boggling. Indie devs can with a bit of effort generate much of their art via this for peanuts (the only problem may be consistency from what I've seen, basically every image is like from another artist, even in same batch)
- GaggiX 4y ago
  The biggest problem is that you can't do much if not conditioning the generation with your prompt and maybe image embeddings, if you are an indie dev you would probably find much more useful Stable Diffusion.
- chillfox 4y ago
  If you control the --chaos --stylize and --seed then you can get more consistent results.
Kye 4y ago
Stable Diffusion is a thing you can run on your computer for free and train models for. It's from a research university. Is this one of those more expansive definitions of startup?
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  Presumably he means stability.ai is a startup.
- l33tman 4y ago
  Stability AI who trained Stable Diffusion is a $100M startup. See https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stability-ai https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stability-ai
andybak 4y ago
Dall-E is still ahead of the competition for some tasks. Midjourney has a very polished look but it lacks the depth of understanding that Dall-E can manage. I regularly hit prompts that I need to jump into Dall-E for.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  For playing around, sure. For serious work though you probably need control-net in some way, otherwise you end up with a bunch of images which are great on their own but make no sense together.
- l33tman 4y ago
  Yeah, but text understanding is just one part of the "product" in this space nowadays. If you look at all the modes and features a GUI around SD can do now (like AUTOMATIC1111's) and compare to what you can do at the DALLE2 webpage it's night and day.
motoxpro 4y ago
I wouldnt consider stable diffusion, mid journey and Open AI products. Little bit too low level, they seem to be more platforms that the products are built on. Not to say they aren’t amazing, just that the productized versions (one level up) are being executed really well by the big companies.

ghaff 4y ago

In Adobe's case, it absolutely makes sense it would be a feature of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere. They've been adding various "smart" masking features and the like over time already.

tensor 4y ago

Microsoft is just licensing their technology from OpenAI, which is still a small company, if not still a startup.

motoxpro 4y ago
ChatGPT is not nearly as good of a product as what was demoed by Microsoft if you want to make that comparison. Not talking about LLMs/underlying model. I don’t think adobe makes their own either. Talking about the interface to it.
- jmknoll 4y ago
  What MS demo are you referring to? I like chatgpt way more than new Bing’s GPT interface.
  - motoxpro 4y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf-dbS9CcRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf-dbS9CcRU
    - jmknoll 4y ago
      Thank you. I hadn’t seen that. That is indeed pretty impressive.
- random_cynic 4y ago
  Without the underlying model what's the point of the facade?
  - motoxpro 4y ago
    GPT-3 had been out for almost a year before ChatGPT and no one cared
    - jmknoll 4y ago

time_to_smile 4y ago

> AI is a feature, not a product Part of the reason for this is that very often the best applications of AI are really invisible to the user, making everything a little bit better, quietly behind the scenes. The same is true for software in general. The best software products automate loads of stuff behind the scenes so from the user perspective they just click a button and the thing they want to happen, happens. Perhaps the most successful and important AI product is a great example of this: the spam filter. I bet most younger email users don't even realize how much value this old AI tool provides them unseen. But the trouble is making effective AI products is not "sexy" right now, and if your team ships one it won't get any credit in a big company. I've had my PM instantly shoot down plenty of interesting applications of AI that wouldn't be very visible to the customer or larger product-org.

Dalewyn 4y ago
I don't fundamentally disagree, but if spam filters are "AI" then my bloody toaster is also artificially intelligent.
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  You must have a smarter toaster than I do. My toaster is a completely deterministic mechanism that knows nothing about my past toasting experience, nor makes any inference about future toast. A spam filter: - Is provided historic information about the problem - Learns from this information to construct a basic model of language - Is then provided unseen information - Then makes a probabilistic decision based on a degree of uncertainty. The exact model behind the spam filtering can be extremely simple (naive Bayes) but could easily (and probably will without you even realizing it) expand to include things like GPT. A spam filter is making decisions under uncertainty with new information based on patterns it learned from previous information. If this doesn't fit your definition of "AI" then I think if you understood what was happening under the hood I don't think you would consider GPT to be AI either. If you toaster does learn your toast preference over time from your toasting behavior (unlike mine) then I would consider that AI as well.
  - 4y ago

MrScruff 4y ago

Isn’t almost everything on this page concept stuff though? Seems like the only thing they’re shipping is text to image and the results they show look pretty underwhelming. Seems like all these big companies are pushing amazing looking concept videos more than anything.

jamilton 4y ago
Yeah, I thought it was funny that most of the page is "in the future...". Guess they're trying to get attention for the product before it's ready and gauge interest/response.

akira2501 4y ago

> Interesting that the large company AI products (this, Microsoft copilot, etc) are so much more compelling than any of the startups I’ve seen. This is an indicative signal. It's amazing how easily it is ignored. > Makes me think that we haven’t seen what true innovation looks like in this space. It's interesting that a bunch of product add-ons could be considered "innovation" in the first place.