A breakout moment of Generative AI market, are you missing out? (EN/FR)
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“Artificial intelligence has been used to generate content for centuries, with early examples including the use of mechanical Turk machines to generate text for telegraphs in the 19th century. However, the use of artificial intelligence to generate content has seen a surge in recent years, with the rise of natural language processing and machine learning algorithms.”
This is how this article would have started if we asked an Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write an article about the Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC).
AIGC is a hot technology that is attracting large investments. The AIGC industry recently made the headlines with a massive $101 million seeding round announced by Stability.Ai, yielding its first unicorn! This article aims at explaining how developed and varied the industry has become, taking two key players as examples.
1- AIGC industry: a growing market
a- What is AIGC (Generative AI)?
After revolutionizing the world in manufacturing, customer service, and financial industries, AI can now create content for us, simple humans. This time, AI changes our creative way of doing things. AIGC refers to any content created by a machine. The content can be of any type: social media posts, images, PowerPoint presentations, etc. It usually requires some human input like a prompt, a description, or parameters.
Under the hood, a new algorithm called GPT-3 is used to understand the user’s input meaning and generate readable texts or images. How does it work in practice? You sit in front of your computer, ask him to generate “a salmon swimming down a river”. After waiting a few seconds, your computer proudly shows you its result.
Impressive, right?
This industry recently saw a massive fundraising campaign that brought it under the spotlight.
b- A supernova, Stability AI, raised $1 billion and caught the attention
Stability AI, the London-based start-up leading the creative AI technology, announced last week to have raised $101 million in its first funding seed round. Founded no earlier than three years ago, this unicorn’s mission is to build open-source AI projects including text-to-image generation and model developments in language, learning, audio and biology. This massive fundraising was led by three big name investment funds: Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and O’Shaughnessy Ventures. Following the announcement, many investors started getting in touch with emerging players in the industry, as they don’t want to miss out on the substantial market potential.
Indeed, this funding round raised an important question: Is it a great time to invest in the AIGC industry?
c- Market maturity
After being set aside for 50 years due to the lack of computing power, deep learning techniques recently came under the spotlight. First introduced by Alex Krizhevsky in 2012, at a Computer Vision global competition, the superpower of neural networks was finally shown to be within reach of our computing power. As neural networks proved their worth to the scientific community, the first models were released. They excelled at analytical tasks. Scientists kept developing and improving the models and techniques to attain impressive results, especially in creative tasks. The progress attracts more developers to work on the subject, which makes models become better/faster/cheaper. Given that the prototypes are ready, applications will break out in the market landscape once a product-market fit is defined. This trend indicates that the AIGC market is ready to boom.
2- Existing big players and future landscape
a- Applications to many medias and industries
The Generative AI market landscape is split into several categories: text, code, image, speech, video, and 3D. Each of this domain counts several applications that use a common range of models, specific to their category.
Here are two big players of the AIGC industry who are the representatives of AI copyright tools and AI audio tools respectively with published user cases.
Jasper, AI copywriting assistant
Last Tuesday, one day after the fundraising announcement of Stability.Ai, AI copywriter Jasper announced its $125 million Series A funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation. A second unicorn after Stability AI! It generates high quality copy for emails, ads, websites, blogs and more. The goal is to give time and mental space back to the writers so they can focus on the more human elements of the writing process (opinion, narrative, imagination). According to its CEO Dave Rogenmoser, Jasper has more than 70,000 customers and generated $45 million in revenue last year. The company expects the revenue to almost double to $75 million by the end of the year.
Podcast.ai, AI-generated audio
Podcast.ai is a podcast that is entirely generated by an AI. In the first episode, podcast.ai has created a full 20 minute interview between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs. The episode covered product design and life philosophy using AI-generated voices. The fabricated Rogan was realized after analyzing numerous past episodes of his podcast, while the fabricated Jobs was realized after analyzing a limited set of his speech. If you are curious, you can check it out here: https://podcast.ai/.
b- Bright prospect, big market, many user cases