Silicon Valley consoles itself with generative AI

The crypto debacle, which began last spring, culminated in mid-November with the fraudulent bankruptcy of one of its main platforms, FTX. The sad twists and turns of the past few months on the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk has resulted in the departure of more than half of its workforce, the exodus of advertisers and the return of Donald Trump to the social network. Meta separates from 11,000 of its employees while Apple and Google freeze their hiring… Silicon Valley seems to be on the brink.

It is very bad to know this ecosystem to believe it. The life of the Valley is made up of adventures and develops even more according to the crises it undergoes: 1993, 2000, 2007, a bit like with the earthquakes, we were waiting for the “Big One” which was slow to come. We may be there, and it would be for his greatest good. Not only will start-ups finally be able to once again hire talents that the Gammas (Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Apple) have been monopolizing for a few years, but it’s also an opportunity to talk about something other than Web3 .

Advances in Generative Artificial Intelligences

Indeed, Silicon Valley, for a few weeks, has only been interested in generative artificial intelligences which have made dazzling progress in many fields. We see more and more students using GPT-3 or Jasper to do their homework. Based on a few billion examples taken from Wikipedia and other textual sources, these automatic text generators indeed write entire paragraphs in a few seconds from snippets of sentences… with more or less success, but it is enough to go over it quickly in order to obtain a result sufficient to deceive a proofreader. Recently in Colorado, Jason Allen, a local entrepreneur without the slightest artistic streak, won a painting competition thanks to his painting Space Opera Theater, in French in the text.

He had designed it with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence that generates images from text, like its new competitors Dall-E or Stable Diffusion. Jason Allen has made no secret of using this technology and has sparked fears that these tools will replace artists. But make no mistake, it is the humans who use these tools to perfection who become the new creators. They certainly do not create in the same way, but when we see the complexity and the number of instructions necessary for the development of a table, we understand better that this capacity is now elevated to the rank of business arousing vocations and creation of companies around this concept.

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In illustration, an image that I created in about ten iterations by asking Stable Diffusion to generate “a realistic metallic robotic hand that writes an article”. I have full distribution rights to this image, as if I drew it myself in Photoshop.

By Luc Julia, author of Artificial Intelligence does not exist