Hi there, Fortune tech editor Alexei Oreskovic filling in for Jeremy today.
Fortune’s Brainstorm A.I. conference just wrapped up in San Francisco, and I'm still processing the litany of mind-boggling tools and concepts that were discussed by some of the leading lights in the A.I. field, as well as the many notes of caution from those who understand the power of this technology better than anyone.
Generative A.I. was the star of the show, coming up continuously in on–stage discussions, informal chats in the hallways among attendees, and after-hours dinner conversations.
With OpenAI’s new ChatGPT having just been released days earlier, it seemed like every guest who arrived at the conference had some story to share about their experience playing around with the tool, or thoughts about how pivotal of a moment this is for artificial intelligence.
“It still feels surreal to be born into this time of history and be in the middle of this technology,” said Stanford Institute for Human-Centered A.I. co-director Fei-Fei Li about recent innovations like ChatGPT.
Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott said that ChatGPT was showing the world how far A.I. has come and all its possibilities. “One of the things it does is really open up the aperture of who can use A.I. now,” Scott said during an on-stage discussion on Tuesday.
According to Scott, large language models like those used by ChatGPT provide foundations on which to build new products and services that leverage the power of A.I. without requiring someone to have a degree in computer science.
“We are now able to invest in building these really big things, and then thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people can use them to build all sorts of incredible things," he said.
Of course, Generative A.I. isn’t just about generating text. Image generation is advancing at an equally dizzying clip, and several examples, including OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, were showcased at the conference.
Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque gave the audience the first public look at the latest version of the company’s image generator, Stable Diffusion 2.1. The image generator understands 2 billion different concepts, which it can transform into images at an ever faster speed—by next week, Mostaque said, it will generate 30 images per second, compared to one image in 5.6 seconds when the first version of the product was released in August.
And while Stable Diffusion makes its technology open source, Mostaque's ambitions for his product's business potential is sky-high.
“Every single creative industry in the world is going to have to react to this. As of next week this is 30 frames per second, which is basically video,” Mostaque said.
Mostaque showed off the tool’s on-the-fly interface by asking it to create an image of Eye on A.I.’s own Jeremy Kahn as an astronaut (he noted that the tool had been pre-fed 4 photographs of Jeremy to make the task possible). Sure enough, Jeremy’s smiling face soon appeared in a realistic-looking spacesuit, with the Earth floating in the background.
When Mostaque next asked it to turn spaceman Jeremy into a Van Gogh painting, the tool showed some of its remarkable powers and limitations. It quickly spit out the astronaut’s face rendered in the broad, vibrant brushstrokes associated with the Dutch painter—unfortunately the face in the image was no longer Jeremy’s, or at least not our Jeremy Kahn’s.
Read on for more news and highlights from the Brainstorm A.I. conference, which was sponsored by Accenture.
Alexei Oreskovic
@lexnfx
alexei.oreskovic@fortune.com
