Everyday we are bombarded with various buzzwords and Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is one of those, but what actually is Generative AI?
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence technology that can produce various types of content, including text, imagery, audio and synthetic data. Generative AI can learn from existing content to generate new, realistic content that reflect the characteristics of the training data but don’t repeat it. It can produce a variety of novel content, such as images, video, music, speech, text, software code and product designs.
How does generative AI work?
Generative AI starts with a prompt that could be in the form of a text, an image, a video, a design, musical notes, or any input that the AI system can process. Various AI algorithms then return new content in response to the prompt. Content can include essays, solutions to problems, or realistic fakes created from pictures or audio of a person.
Now, pioneers in generative AI are developing better user experiences that let you describe a request in plain language. After an initial response, you can also customize the results with feedback about the style, tone and other elements you want the generated content to reflect.
Some of the popular generative AI interfaces are.
1) Dall-E. Trained on a large data set of images and their associated text descriptions, Dall-E is an example of a multimodal AI application that identifies connections across multiple media, such as vision, text and audio.
2) ChatGPT. The AI-powered chatbot that took the world by storm in November 2022 was built on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 implementation. OpenAI has provided a way to interact and fine-tune text responses via a chat interface with interactive feedback. Earlier versions of GPT were only accessible via an API. GPT-4 was released March 14, 2023.
3) Bard. Google was another early leader in pioneering transformer AI techniques for processing language, proteins and other types of content. It open sourced some of these models for researchers. However, it never released a public interface for these models. Microsoft’s decision to implement GPT into Bing drove Google to rush to market a public-facing chatbot, Google Bard, built on a lightweight version of its LaMDA family of large language models.
The following visual gives a timeline of how generative AI has evolved over time.
