You have no doubt heard about ChatGPT and/or DALL·E, which have been growing continuously for several years. It's about artificial intelligences.
Marvin Minsky, an MIT professor and one of the pioneers in this field, described artificial intelligence as “the construction of computer programs capable of performing tasks that are, for the moment, performed more satisfactorily by human beings.”
This makes AI not a science as such, but several branches that have developed over the past six decades. How do these revolutionary tools operate and who are the major players?
OpenAI: the company that is revolutionizing AI
OpenAI is a company founded in 2015 by several entrepreneurs, headquartered in San Francisco, specializing in artificial reasoning for “capped profit.”
The Californian startup was founded by Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla and SpaceX, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, and Sam Altman, the director of a popular startup incubator. The company's objective is to develop artificial intelligence technologies that are very advanced but that are “human-friendly”, that is to say that they benefit humanity.
“If the AI they're developing goes wrong, we risk having a powerful and immortal dictator forever,” Elon Musk told New Yorker magazine in 2016.
The organization is considered to be a leader in the field of artificial intelligence. Company employees regularly share research results through scientific publications, open source software, and data, maintaining their commitment to transparency and accessibility for users. Its recent success comes from the development of ChatGPT and DALL-E.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is undoubtedly one of OpenAI's most popular innovations. It is a language model based on GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) transformation technology. Trained on billions of sentences in English, this program is now capable of generating text independently. Designed to simulate human conversation, it provides consistent and relevant answers to questions. Initially available only in English, it now supports several dozen languages, although its understanding may still have some limitations.
On March 14, 2023, OpenAI made public the official announcement of GPT-4, a more powerful language model that can also analyze images. A version of ChatGPT based on GPT-4 becomes available via the paid “ChatGPT Plus” subscription.
In 2023, Microsoft officially announced in a press release, its strengthening of the partnership with OpenAI. This multinational IT company has taken the initiative to invest billions of dollars in the Californian startup. The objective of this investment is to support all research, API services, and product workloads, thereby contributing to a significant financial commitment to the evolution and development of sustainable technologies.
Google launches Bard to counter OpenAI-Microsoft's ChatGPT
Following the recent success of ChatGPT, the American IT giant reacted by launching a search engine powered by artificial intelligence in early February 2023. This engine has striking similarities to the software developed by OpenAI. Google has just integrated this technology into its search engines in the United States and the United Kingdom.
“Bard aims to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our great language models,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, Google's parent company.
Bard is based on the LAMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) language model, a computer program developed by Google to create conversational robots, also called chatbots.
After this statement, Microsoft announced a significant improvement in the performance of the Bing search engine in the area of natural language, thanks to the integration of artificial intelligence and GPT 3.5 languages. This innovative model was designed by OpenAI.
What is DALL-E?
DALL-E is an AI image generator designed by OpenAI in 2021. For its part, it offers the possibility of generating photorealistic images or images that resemble drawings, sketches, diagrams, etc. from textual descriptions. It's a 12 billion-parameter version of GPT-3. It even makes it possible to imitate the style of a specific artist, making allegiance to a major artistic movement possible. Dallas's results adapt closely to human needs and its understanding of natural language is remarkable. Image creation is random, ensuring that no two results will ever be the same. These specimens therefore seem to have a unique value.
An Empire Under the Sign of the X
In 2018, OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk made the decision to leave the company in order to avoid any conflicts of interest related to his own artificial intelligence work with Tesla.
In March 2023, the entrepreneur created a new company specialized in AI, named X.AI and based in Nevada. This initiative places the company in the face of fierce competition from already established market leaders, namely OpenAI and DeepMind, the AI arm of Alphabet (Google's parent company).
Revealing his ambitions, the billionaire recently recruited Igor Babuschkin and Manuel Kroiss, both of whom had acquired their experience at DeepMind.
Currently, no one has a clear understanding of the main directions of X.AI. Elon Musk has not yet fully disclosed his plans and aspirations in terms of artificial intelligence. Are we in favor of the emergence of non-human minds capable of surpassing humans in terms of quantity and intellectual quality, potentially leading to their replacement?
