Bakz T. Future on the Evolution of OpenAI, ChatGPT, DALL-E, and What's Next
Video interview from the Synthedia Conference in December
Bakz T. Future is a software developer that was monitoring the AI research world for several years and became one of the first people to get access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 in 2020. He then created a series of 23 videos in 2021 on the future of OpenAI, GPT-3, DALL-E, and their impact on human creativity.
As an early user of DALL-E 2, he also created the baseline image known as “a photo of a confused grizzly bear in calculus class.” This image has become a meme and one that text-to-image models have replicated as public tests.
Earlier this year, Bakz created the GPT-3/DALL-E State of the Union Address, which he will tell you is already out-of-date. However, there are still a lot of valuable insights in the 32-minute video if you want to go deeper into how we arrived where we are today. The key items that are missing from later 2022 are ChatGPT, GPT-3.5, and Point-E because it was recorded before these releases.
InstructGPT Led to ChatGPT
Bakz also goes into the history of InstructGPT, which was released in February 2022. He breaks down how it was different and foreshadowed the technology we now see in ChatGPT and GPT-3.5. A short excerpt from his comments is included below.
“Probably the biggest thing out of the gate was InstructGPT. This is an OpenAI training approach where they basically took their existing GPT-3 model and, using this process known as reinforcement learning with human feedback, they made it align better with the needs of GPT-3 developers. So, with InstructGPT, when you enter a prompt, you get back an answer which is more suitable to what you are asking—the kind of format or template or quality of response. There were improvements across safety and trust well…ChatGPT and Davinci-003, which was announced last month, are the next interaction of the InstructGPT work.”
What to Expect Going Forward
Bakz finished up with a discussion around adversarial thinking and four things to expect from OpenAI and the broader generative AI market in 2023. He believes ChatGPT is an “Easter egg product,” and if that is true, there are many new applications likely to appear very soon.
This was a fun interview that offered a historical context around how these models developed, some practical insights, and a view of where this all is headed. Enjoy!
Extremely useful information. Helping someone like me, who is disabled, non-techie, but wants to take advantage of technology to stay empowered, to understand the future. Thnaks also for introducing DALL.E2. I have been creating pictures and sharing it with friends just to show that I need not depend on anyone to generate pictures or illustrations for my newsletter or articles. It's pure fun and so so enjoyable. Thanks.