Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, watches a news conference after the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon spacecraft was lifted on an unmanned test flight to the International Space Station from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in March 2 , 2019.
Mike Blake | Reuters
Armchairs in the shape of avocados and baby daikon radishes bearing tutu are one of the peculiar images created by a new software from OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab supported by Elon Musk in San Francisco.
OpenAI trained the software, known as Dall-E, to generate images from short text subtitles. It specifically used a data set of 12 billion images and their captions found on the internet.
According to the lab, Dall-E – a portant 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 variety of concepts.
OpenAI showed some of the results in a blog post published on Tuesday. ‘We found out that it [Dall-E] ‘has a diverse range of functions, including creating anthropomorphic 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 computer system vaguely inspired by the human brain that can detect patterns and recognize relationships between large amounts of data.
While neural networks have generated images and videos in the past, 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 extent that it has become difficult for people to distinguish between what is real and what is generated by computer. General Adverse 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, broad social impact”, adding that it plans to analyze how models such as Dall-E relate to social issues such as economic impact on certain work processes and occupations, the possibility of bias in the model outputs and the longer-term ethical challenges that this technology implies. ‘
GPT-3 successor
Dall-E comes just a few months after OpenAI announced that it was building a text generator called GPT-3 (Generative Pre-training), which is also supported by a neural network.
The language generation tool is capable of producing human text on demand, and it became relatively well known for an AI program when people realized that it could write its own poetry, news articles, and short stories.
“Dall-E is a Text2Image system based on GPT-3, but trained in text plus images,” Mark Riedl, associate professor at the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, told CNBC.
“Text2image is not new, but the Dall-E demo is notable for producing illustrations that are far more coherent than other Text2Image systems I’ve seen in the last few years.”
OpenAI has competed with companies like DeepMind and the Facebook AI research group to set up common algorithms that can perform a wide range of tasks on a human level and beyond.
Researchers have built AIs that can play complex games like chess and the Chinese board game Go, translate one human language into another, and spot tumors in a mammogram. But getting an AI system to show real “creativity” is a big challenge in the industry.
Riedl said the Dall-E results show that he has learned how to mix concepts coherently, adding that “the ability to mix concepts coherently is considered a key form of creativity in humans.”
“From a creativity standpoint, it’s 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 the University of Cambridge, described it as an inspiring demonstration of the ability of these models to store and generalize information about our world in ways that people find very natural. ‘
He said: “I expect there will be all kinds of applications of this type of technology. I can not even imagine. But it is also interesting to be another beautiful technology that solves problems that we have not done. Know even that we actually had. ‘
‘Does not promote the condition of AI’
However, not everyone is so impressed by Dall-E.
Gary Marcus, an entrepreneur who sold a machine learning business to Uber in 2016 for an unknown amount, told CNBC it’s interesting, but it does not promote the condition of AI.
He also pointed out that it has not yet been opened and that the company has not yet published any academic paper on the research.
Marcus had earlier questioned whether some of the research published by rival laboratory DeepMind in recent years should be classified as ‘breakthroughs’.
OpenAI was founded as a non-profit enterprise with a $ 1 billion pledge from a group of founders, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In February 2018, Musk left the OpenAI board, but he 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 is OpenAI’s first commercial product and Reddit was one of the first customers to sign up.