SpaceX founder Elon Musk observes a post-launch press conference after the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew Dragon spacecraft took off on an unmanned test flight to the International Space Station from of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, March. 2 of 2019.
Mike Blake | Reuters
Avocado-shaped armchairs and daikon radishes for babies wearing tutus are among the quirky images created by new software from OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab backed by Elon Musk in 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 device by Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and Wall-E, a small animated robot from the Pixar film of the same name, had learned to create images for a wide range of concepts. .
OpenAI showed some of the results in a blog post posted 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 of plausible shapes, text representation, and applying transformations to existing images, ”the company wrote.
Dall-E is based on a neural network, which is a computer system loosely inspired by the human brain that can detect patterns and recognize relationships between large amounts of data.
Although neural networks have generated images and videos before, Dall-E is unusual because it relies on text input, while others do not.
Synthetic videos and images have become more sophisticated in recent years, to the point that it has been difficult for humans to distinguish between the real and the computer-generated. General opposing 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 plans to analyze the relationship of models like Dall-E with social issues such as the economic impact on certain work processes and professions. the potential for bias in model results and the long-term ethical challenges involved in this technology. “
Successor to GPT-3
Dall-E arrives a few months after OpenAI announced that it had created a text generator called GPT-3 (Generative Pre-training), which is also based on a neural network.
The language generation tool is capable of producing human-sized text on demand and became relatively famous for an AI program when people realized that it could write poetry, news articles, and stories of its own.
“Dall-E is a Text2Image system based on GPT-3 but formatted in text and images,” Mark Riedl, an associate professor at the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing Computing, told CNBC.
“Text2image isn’t new, but the Dall-E demo is notable for producing much more consistent illustrations than other Text2Image systems I’ve seen in recent years.”
OpenAI has been competing with companies such as DeepMind and 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 created AI that can play complex games such as chess and the Go Chinese board game, translate one human language to another, and detect tumors on a mammogram. But getting an AI system that shows genuine “creativity” is a big challenge in the industry.
Riedl said Dall-E’s results show that he has learned to combine concepts consistently, adding that “the ability to combine concepts consistently is considered a key form of creativity in humans.”
“From a creativity standpoint, this is a big step forward,” Riedl added. “While there isn’t much agreement on what it means to ‘understand’ something for an AI system, 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 generalize it in ways that humans find very natural.”
He said: “I hope there are all kinds of applications of this kind of technology, I can’t even begin to imagine it. But it’s also interesting in terms of being another amazing technology that solves problems that don’t we did even know we actually had it. “
“The state of AI is not advancing”
However, not everyone is so impressed with Dall-E.
Gary Marcus, a businessman who sold a machine learning company to Uber in 2016 for an undisclosed sum, told CNBC that it is interesting, but that “it doesn’t advance the state of AI.”
He also noted that it has not opened and that the company has not yet published any academic article on the research.
Marcus has previously questioned whether some of the research published by rival lab DeepMind in recent years should be classified as “advances.”
OpenAI was set up as a nonprofit with a $ 1 billion pledge from a group of founders that included Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In February 2018, Musk left the board of OpenAI, but continues to give and advise the organization.
OpenAI won in 2019 and raised another $ 1 billion from Microsoft to fund its research. GPT-3 will be OpenAI’s first commercial product and Reddit has registered as one of the first customers.