SpaceX founder Elon Musk is watching a post-launch press conference after the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew Dragon spacecraft went on an unmanned test flight to the International Space Station at Cape Kennedy Space Center. Canaveral, Florida, March. 2, 2019.
Mike Blake | Reuters
Avocado and daikon radish armchairs for tutus babies are among the weird images created by a new piece of software from OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab run by Elon Musk of San Francisco.
OpenAI trained the software, known as Dall-E, to generate images from short text subtitles. He specifically used a data set of 12 billion images and their subtitles, which were found on the Internet.
The lab said Dall-E – a portmaneau of Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali and Wall-E, a small animated robot from the Pixar movie of the same name – learned how to create images for a wide range of concepts.
OpenAI showed some of the results in a blog post published on Tuesday. “It simply came to our notice then [Dall-E] it has a diverse set of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, combining unrelated concepts in plausible ways, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images, “the company wrote.
Dall-E is built on a neural network, which is a vague computing system inspired by the human brain that can detect patterns and recognize the relationships between large amounts of data.
While neural networks have generated images and videos before, Dall-E is unusual because it relies on text inputs, while others do not.
Synthetic videos and images have become more sophisticated in recent years, as it has become difficult for people to distinguish between what is real and what is computer-generated. General Contradiction Networks (GANs), which use two neural networks, have been used to create fake videos of politicians, for example.
OpenAI acknowledged that Dall-E has “the potential for significant and broad social impacts,” adding that it intends to look at how models such as Dall-E “address social issues, such as the economic impact on certain work processes and professions.” , the results of the model and the long-term ethical challenges involved in this technology. “
Successor GPT-3
Dall-E comes just months after OpenAI announced it had built a text generator called GPT-3 (Generative Pre-training), which is also supported by a neural network.
The language-generating tool is able to produce equally human text on demand and became relatively famous for an artificial intelligence program when people realized they could write their own poetry, news articles, and short stories.
“Dall-E is a Text2Image system based on GPT-3, but trained on text plus images,” Mark Riedl, an associate professor at Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing Computing, told CNBC.
“Text2image is not new, but the Dall-E demonstration is remarkable for producing illustrations that are much more consistent than other Text2Image systems we’ve seen in years.”
OpenAI has competed with companies such as DeepMind and the Facebook group AI Research to build general-purpose algorithms that can perform a wide range of tasks at the human level and beyond.
Researchers have built AI that can play complex games such as chess and the Chinese board game Go, translate one human language into another, and observe tumors on a mammogram. But getting an AI system that shows genuine “creativity” is a big challenge in the industry.
Riedl said the Dall-E results show that he learned how to mix concepts consistently, adding that “the ability to mix concepts consistently is considered a key form of creativity in people.”
“In terms of creativity, this is a big step forward,” Riedl added. “While there is not much agreement on what it means for an AI system to ‘understand’ something, the ability to use concepts in new ways is an important part of creativity and intelligence.”
Neil Lawrence, the former director of machine learning at Amazon Cambridge, told CNBC that Dall-E looks “very impressive.”
Lawrence, who is now a professor of machine learning at Cambridge University, described it as “an inspiring demonstration of the ability of these models to store information about our world and to generalize in ways that people find very natural.”
He said: “I expect there to be all kinds of applications of this type of technology, I can’t even begin to imagine. But it’s also interesting in that it’s another pretty amazing technology that solves problems that we didn’t even know we actually had. “
“AI status is not advancing”
However, not everyone is so impressed with Dall-E.
Gary Marcus, an entrepreneur who sold a machine learning start-up to Uber in 2016 for an undisclosed amount, told CNBC that it is interesting, but “does not advance the state of AI.”
He also stressed that it has not been opened and that the company has not yet published an academic paper on research.
Marcus questioned whether some of the research published by rival laboratory DeepMind in recent years should be classified as “discoveries.”
OpenAI was founded as a non-profit organization with a $ 1 billion commitment from a group of founders that included Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In February 2018, Musk left the OpenAI board of directors, but continues to donate and advise the organization.
OpenAI made a profit in 2019 and raised another $ 1 billion from Microsoft to fund its research. GPT-3 will be the first commercial OpenAI product, and Reddit has registered as one of the first customers.