• It kicked off last Monday, when Stability AI — the makers of Stable Diffusion, one of the most popular image-generation models — announced it had raised $101 million and become a unicorn. The next day, AI copywriter Jasper announced its own $125 million round and new billion-dollar valuation.

• Sequoia partner Sonya Huang also released a market map of companies in the space. The fact that two newly minted unicorns were on it made it go viral. By Friday, the thought leadership around generative AI was in full force with people like Elad Gil, NFX’s James Currier, and several partners at Coatue all publishing their views on the space.

• By Friday, the thought leadership around generative AI was in full force with people like Elad Gil, NFX’s James Currier, and several partners at Coatue all publishing their views on the space

‍Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) - The Basics

Generative AI is the next step in software. It furthers  the human-machine partnership by utilizing deep learning engines to generate new content via a very human like process. It enables a revolution in software, moving from automating manual work to actually generating new work  products.

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Generative Tech is the tools that  leverage AI models to deliver end value via thousands of end user  applications – what humans will actually use to create content. Many of these platforms, and the applications built on top of them, have the potential to transform industries.

While we didn’t collectively have a name for Generative AI until a month ago, the sector is progressing rapidly with companies generating real revenues and high valuations (i.e., Jasper AI,  Stable Diffusion and Open AI).

A Brief History

(1) Pre 2015

Small Models for analytical tasks with use cases in delivery time prediction and fraud classification

(2) 2015 to Today

Development of a new neural network  architecture for natural language understanding that can generate superior quality language models requiring significantly less time to train and can be customized for certain use cases easily. Key Example Open AI’s GPT-3 model that can deliver code generation and tongue-in-cheek joke writing on Twitter.

(3) 2022 and Onwards

Compute costs become cheaper, new techniques develop to train and run inference for larger models and increase access from closed betas to open beta and some open source. Remind you of the advent of the App Store developer boom utilizing the Camera, GPS and instant connectivity of the iPhone 3G post 2008?

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‍Disruptive Use Cases

Deemed to be the biggest change to the internet since crypto, through Generative AI –  human activities will  change quickly. In the creative process in going from a blank slate to  something tangible; historically software was used to develop the end product but was independent of the initial creative process.

Up to 2 billion creative & knowledge workers will become faster and better at their jobs – from coding to graphic design, product design to law, marketing to sale, social media to gaming, advertising and architecture –  is up for reinvention.

With Generative AI – the tech will  work with us from the beginning of any project establishing a “new normal” of how humans and machine interact to create.

Defined believes in the potential of Generative AI to transform industries, and is actively looking to partner with companies that are doing something unique. If you know of companies in this field, please have them get in touch!

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