ChatGPT Sparks Generative AI Hype In San Francisco

A conference of techies and investors in San Francisco on Tuesday didn't give off the impression that the tech industry is in a slump despite huge layoffs at leading tech companies and a weak economy.

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Rather, there was a general sense of hope.

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They were there to talk about the most recent trend in technology at the time: generative artificial intelligence. The technology is well-known to the general public thanks to ChatGPT, which has captured people's attention with its capacity to produce innovative prose in response to written stimuli.

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A general phrase for algorithms that employ artificial intelligence to generate new content from difficult requests, such as "produce an image of pandas draped over living room furniture" or "compose a poem about monkeys in the style of Robert Frost," is "generative AI."

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While artificial intelligence (AI) more broadly refers to computer programs that may improve themselves by "learning" from new data, which have long been employed in the background of various types of software, generative AI is a novel consumer-facing interpretation of the idea.

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The Gen AI Conference, hosted by startup Jasper on Tuesday, attracted almost 1,000 attendees from all over the world, including content marketers and AI researchers. The sumptuous event was hosted at Pier 27 on the Embarcadero, which has a view of San Francisco Bay.

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Guests enjoyed free farm-to-table lunches and bonne bouche treats while sipping coffee from mugs rather than the throwaway cups that are common at most tech gatherings. The computer-generated images that covered the walls in the "Art Experience" room, which featured scenes of multicolored cityscapes and abstract, morphing patterns, allowed visitors to lose themselves in them.

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Ken Walton, vice president of growth for Azra Gaming, which uses blockchain technology and is supported by Andreessen Horowitz, said, "To me, it feels like it's breaking in a manner that Web3 felt like in 2021."

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He told Trade Algo, "There's a sense of wide-open opportunity."

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The latest innovation

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The tech sector was severely impacted by rising interest rates and the subsequent cryptocurrency crash of 2022, which caused venture-backed giants like FTX and BlockFi to collapse and caused many digital coins to lose a large amount of value.

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The San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley were in a gloomy mood.

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Then Microsoft's ChatGPT arrived.

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OpenAI is a startup with funding. A "big language model" is a type of machine learning technology that underlies ChatGPT and is not brand-new. But because of the talking program's user-friendly interface, the general public could suddenly experiment with cutting-edge software that was previously only available to techies and AI researchers.

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The tech industry felt intriguing again all of a sudden. The criticism has increased after the venture capital community invested $1.4 billion in businesses that focus on technology last year.

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According to Sameer Dholakia of Bessemer Venture Partners, generative AI has the potential to transform "the lives of billions of people."

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Jasper, a conference organizer, secured $125 million in capital from backers like Bessemer, Coatue, and IVP in October. Jasper employs technologies from OpenAI and other companies in its software, which among other things generates advertising material for advertisers.

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Yet, because generative AI is still so young, startups are still looking for suitable business use cases and ways to make money. Investors feel that content marketing provides an easy sale because language models, like OpenAI's GPT family of software, have gotten considerably better at producing understandable writing.

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Arshavir Blackwell, a principal of Arvoinen Consulting and a conference attendee, said to Trade Algo that he is interested in leveraging generative AI tools like ChatGPT to create more engaging Facebook advertising for clients as part of his consulting firm. Blackwell asserted that he thinks text-generating software has advanced to the point where advertisers may be able to create advertising copy that connects with users in novel ways.

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Blackwell attributes OpenAI and ChatGPT with demonstrating to the public the potential of generative AI and bringing attention to the sector as a whole.

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Blackwell noted that the AI startup maintained releasing new versions of the software despite the fact that it had a tendency to create false information and the occasional offensive remark. "They were not hesitant to take chances," Blackwell stated.

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The development of the machine-learning software that enables these programs to produce increasingly realistic text and images has also been facilitated by advancements in computing, particularly the emergence of a specific type of computer chip known as a GPU.

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Computing has been the barrier, according to Blackwell.

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For now, firms like OpenAI and Stability AI, which built a well-known open-source image-generating tool, rely on huge investors to provide them with the money to create their tools. Nevertheless, he notes training these massive AI systems "costs like $5 million."

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Dario Amodei, the Founder of AI startup Anthropic, told conference attendees that businesses are becoming more at ease spending a ton of money on AI since they see the technology becoming more adept every day.

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Up until a year ago, AI programs, according to Amodei, "could only justify a few million dollars." People are currently spending $100 million, he claimed.

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Yet, generative AI-based software can be cumbersome, especially when users force it to carry out actions that it wasn't designed to. For instance, based on specific prompts, Microsoft's recently announced experimental chat capability for its Bing search engine has been generating strange and occasionally disturbing chats.

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In response to the controversy, Microsoft wrote on its blog, "The model occasionally tries to answer or reflect in the tone in which it is being asked to provide responses, which can lead to a style we didn't intend."

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It's a mystery that surrounds the creation and application of generative AI.

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"I've never seen a technology that is generated as such," said Amodei to the audience, "where on the one hand you put all this data in, you've got thousands of GPUs, it costs $10 million, maybe $100 million, to train, and once you've trained it, you don't necessarily know everything it can do."

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Generated AI is an intriguing alternative for content production, but let's be honest, the content is pretty dull and generic, as Sapphire Ventures president and partner Jai Das commented on Twitter.

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In a subsequent tweet, he clarified, "Basically, it's simply a tool.

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Yet, generative AI was more than simply a tool for one day in San Francisco. It represented the next development in computing.

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We are aware that this is one of those times, Dholakia said to the audience. As with cloud computing, mobile devices, and the internet before it, this is a technological advance that radically alters the way we conduct business.