There have been a few rumblings lately about Meta entering the AI race. And even though they might not be someone we associate with AI yet, they certainly have opinions on the AI flavor of the week.
Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, says that OpenAI's ChatGPT program is “not unique or particularly innovative”.
It wasn’t all bad takes from LeCun though. He did add that the program is well-put-together and nicely done, but just “not revolutionary”.
He said that the idea of OpenAI being alone in its type of work is inaccurate, as many companies and research labs have built similar data-driven AI systems in the past.
LeCun went on to state that ChatGPT uses Transformer architectures that are pre-trained in a self-supervised manner, which is something that he has been advocating for a long time, even before OpenAI existed.
LeCun stated that the ChatGPT program is a case less of scientific breakthroughs than it is an instance of decent engineering.
He compared the program to IBM's Watson computer and entrepreneur Sebastian Thrun's self-driving vehicle, stating that it was not particularly innovative in terms of the underlying science but was just very well-engineered.
My two cents: Nike wasn’t the first to make shoes. But they sure as hell marketed them better. The stuff Yann is discrediting OpenAI for are things very few people will care about. Their go-to-market strategy was 100x better than what had been done before, so they got all the hype they deserved.
Fiverr, the largest online marketplace for hiring freelancers, has seen a massive spike in interest for AI-related tasks in the last 6 months. In response to the trend, the company is introducing new AI categories to its marketplace.
“We’ve seen a trend of increasing searches for AI-related services,” Yoav Hornung, head of verticals and innovation at Fiverr, told VentureBeat. “We’ve also started seeing more freelancers creating offerings that are related to the world of generative AI, for the most recent tools like ChatGPT, GPT-3, Midjourney, Dall-E and Stable Diffusion.”
Companies are also looking for skilled freelance developers who can help them build their own AI-powered applications.
Fiverr is also seeing sizable demand from businesses looking for help building prompts for the different AI products.
The explosion in the use of generative AI tools for text generation has also led to a new demand for humans to help businesses with proofreading and fact-checking documents and articles written by AI.
It will be interesting to see what the next 6 months looks like for AI searches on Fiverr. Right now, I would wager that most companies seeking AI art specifically are lower-budget businesses that can’t afford human designers and content creators. While the next 6 months will likely be spearheaded by small-medium sized businesses, I would bet that the 2nd half of 2023 sees a lot more enterprise businesses seeking AI creators.
This was originally written for our newsletter Super Artificial. Click here to sign up to receive updated news and insights into AI every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.