A quick overview of AI news in April 2023.
Stability AI Open-Sourced its Large Language Models
Stability AI, the company behind the popular AI image generator Stable Diffusion, has rolled out StableLM, a suite of open-source language models.
The first model, StableLM-Alpha, has been trained on 3 billion and 7 billion parameters. At the end of April, the company released the next model, Stable Vicuna. It’s the first open-source chatbot trained using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).
StableLM can generate text and code, making AI technology accessible for everyone. The models are freely available for commercial or research purposes under the CC BY-SA-4.0 license, allowing developers to use and adapt the StableLM base models through a GitHub repository.
The models are trained on an experimental dataset built on The Pile, but three times larger with 1.5 trillion tokens of content, resulting in surprisingly high performance on conversational and coding tasks, despite its small size.
Photographer Hacks the World Photography Awards With AI-generated Artwork
A Berlin-based artist Boris Eldagsen refused to accept the first prize at the Sony World Photography Awards 2023, one of the most prestigious photography competitions.
He submitted an image entitled THE ELECTRICIAN to the Open Competition in the Creative Category, and it was selected by the judges as the overall winner in its category. The artwork is part of his series called PSEUDOMNESIA, which the author defines as “a fake memory, such as a spurious recollection of events that never took place, as opposed to a memory that is merely inaccurate.” On his website, he notes that the images were co-created with the help of AI image generators.
Eldagsen declined to accept the prize, believing that AI-generated images are separate entities and should not compete with each other in the same category. He arrived to in London to attend the Sony World Photography Awards ceremony and took to the stage to deliver his message, raising the question of what should and shouldn’t be considered a photograph in the age of AI. According to Eldagsen, his mission was to find out if competitions were prepared for AI images, and his action revealed that they weren’t. You can read the whole story, published chronologically, on his blog.
According to Vice, a representative from the World Photography Organization said they were aware of the use of AI in Eldagsen’s winning image. However, he had misled them by saying it was “co-created” with AI. While they welcome experimental approaches to image-making, the awards will always be a platform for championing the skill and excellence of photographers and artists. They also acknowledged the importance of the impact of AI on image-making and look forward to exploring the possibilities of the technology and encouraging conversations around it.
Elon Musk Launches New AI Company and Builds “TruthGPT” To Compete With OpenAI
A few weeks after Elon Musk co-signed an open letter urging AI labs to pause development of AI more powerful than GPT-4, his name made headlines for launching a new AI company and building “TruthGPT” to compete with OpenAI in the generative AI rush.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Musk’s AI company is called X.AI. It was incorporated in Nevada on March 9, 2023, and has Elon Musk as its director. A few days before the news about the AI firm, Business Insider reported that Twitter, which was acquired by Elon Musk last year, purchased “roughly 10,000 graphics processing units,” according to people familiar with the company. This move, along with bringing AI talents from Google’s DeepMind AI lab to Twitter, shows a commitment to AI development.
Finally, Elon Musk himself confirmed the rumors about this in his interview with Fox News. He said that he plans to create his own rival to the OpenAI’s chatbot, which tends to be biased because it is “trained to be politically correct.” Musk calls his version of the innovation “TruthGPT” and sees it as “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”
Elon Musk, who was one of the founders of OpenAI in 2015 and stepped down from the company in 2018, has been a critic of the ChatGPT’s parent company. What’s more, the relationship between Twitter and Microsoft, which is investing in OpenAI, is going downhill after Microsoft stopped supporting Twitter on its advertising platform. Elon Musk responded to the move with a tweet threatening to sue Microsoft for using Twitter data to train algorithms. In late April, The New York Times reported that Twitter’s owner had blocked OpenAI from using the company’s data, saying that the $2 million annual fee that OpenAI paid to license Twitter data to build ChatGPT was not a fair price.
BabyAGI and Autonomous AI Agents: the Next Frontier of AI
The next step in the rapid growth of AI development is the arrival of autonomous AI agents, which we’ve been observing over the past month. As illustrated in the Google Trends graph, the search term “auto GPT” experienced a notable surge in popularity in April. What is so interesting about it that it has attracted so much attention?
Autonomous agents, often powered by the OpenAI’s large-language model, GPT-4, run in a loop to perform tasks, review them, and improve the results. They are considered a first glimpse of AGI because they can generate self-directed tasks and instructions based on a user’s goal, and work on them autonomously until the goal is achieved.
A number of them were released to the public in April. One of the earliest examples, Auto-GPT, was developed by the game company Significant Gravitas and became a trend on GitHub. Another example of autonomous agents is Baby AGI, developed by Yohei Nakajima, a general partner at venture fund Untapped Capital. There are some that you can try out right in your browser, if you want to see how they work, such as AgentGPT by Reworkd or Autogpt by SamurAI.
Here are some examples of what autonomous agents are capable of:
- Create an educational program for entrepreneurs:
- Research the Internet and create a podcast outline:
- Build a website and more.