Generative artificial intelligence under the control of capital

According to foreign media reports, Twitter holder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently revealed on a TV show that he plans to build a product called "TruthGPT" (Truth Generation Pre-training Converter) product to replace the popular artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. In the show, Musk described TruthGPT as an "artificial intelligence product that tries to understand the limits of the nature of the universe and pursue truth."

Musk has a close relationship with OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company that launched ChatGPT. In December 2015, he, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman and others founded OpenAI in San Francisco. The original intention of OpenAI's establishment was to check and balance Google's DeepMind, and also to allow "everyone to have equal rights to use AI." Therefore, the company is positioned as "an open source, non-profit organization." Musk is not only an early investor in OpenAI, but also co-chairman of the board of directors. He even named the company "OpenAI".

However, scientific miracles are never created by "charity". OpenAI released the public beta version of OpenAI Gym, a reinforcement learning research platform, and Universe, a general software platform for measurement and training, in 2016. However, neither of these two products caused much market response; in more than two years after 2017 Here, OpenAI is laying the foundation for generating pre-training models (GPT). The language model GPT-1 and language model GPT-2 it launched have basic reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering and summarization capabilities. However, with the deepening of research and development, the computing resources consumed will double every 3 to 4 months, which means that capital investment must match the exponential growth of resource consumption. OpenAI’s initial start-up capital of US$1 billion will inevitably be stretched. .

In February 2018, Musk resigned from the OpenAI board of directors, claiming that the reason was to avoid business conflicts with the artificial intelligence system of Tesla’s self-driving cars. He tweeted: "Tesla and OpenAI are competing for the same people, and I don't agree with some of the things the OpenAI team wants to do."

The year after Musk left, OpenAI got what it wanted It transformed from a non-profit organization to a "limited for-profit" enterprise and legally introduced venture capital funds through the newly established OpenAI LP. Also in this year, the information industry giant Microsoft provided $1 billion in funding to OpenAI LP, raising its valuation to nearly $3 billion. Since then, Microsoft has invested an additional US$2 billion and US$10 billion in 2021 and 2023 respectively. During this period, OpenAI also ushered in a career development. In 2020, it released the large-scale natural language model GPT-3 and continued to iterate; in 2021, it launched the text description image generation model DALL-E; at the end of 2022, it launched based on GPT-3.5 and detonated The global AI chatbot ChatGPT; its newly launched GPT-4 in 2023 has reached "unprecedented heights in artificial intelligence" in terms of functionality.

However, Musk said in a recent interview with the media, "OpenAI was originally created as an open source, non-profit organization, which is why I named it 'Open'AI. But now it It has become a closed-source company that seeks to maximize profits and is actually controlled by Microsoft. This is not what I want at all."

It seems that capital has changed the "original intention" of OpenAI, but it has achieved ChatGPT. . With the great success of ChatGPT, more and more capital is pouring into the nascent field of generative artificial intelligence. Financing for global generative AI startups set a new record in 2022. CB Insights data shows that there were as many as 110 equity financing cases in this field, with a financing amount of more than US$2.6 billion. Larger-scale financing cases include: Anthropic, an artificial intelligence model development and research institution, raised US$580 million in Series B financing, human-computer interface company Inflection AI raised US$2.25 million in Series A financing, and natural language processing software development company Cohere raised US$125 million. Series B financing, and Jasper’s $1.25 million Series A financing. Currently, six companies in the field of generative artificial intelligence have reached the "unicorn" standard (valued at US$1 billion), namely OpenAI, Hugging Face, Lightricks, Jasper, Glean, and Stability AI.

Even OpenAI has begun to consolidate its position as a leader in artificial intelligence model development by investing in next-generation artificial intelligence startups. In November 2022, OpenAI announced the launch of an accelerator program called "Converge" to provide financial and technical support to early AI startups, including Converge and the robotics startup "1X".

Among these "darlings of capital", who can become the "second OpenAI"?

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