Brian Curran on LinkedIn: Who Owns the Generative AI Platform? Andreessen Horowitz

An excellent article on how generative AI is transforming game development was published by the a16z venture fund. Games have the highest entrance barrier of all types of entertainment since it takes a lot of time and money to create a significant amount of interactive content. Similar to other AI art generators, images created via Ideogram generate compelling but flawed images. The featured image for this story was generated using the prompt “Racoon wearing a Toronto Raptors jersey in Toronto,” with cinematic 3D rendering. Instead, it generated a raccoon wearing an “IAPTOD” jersey that resembles the Raptors’ team branding.

Artificial intelligence has driven profound cross-industry transformation in recent years — and interest in its potential has only accelerated amid the rise of generative AI. Andreessen Horowitz has invested in AI companies disrupting the status quo across industries. We break down its top priorities across enterprise tech, healthcare, and beyond. The first wave of generative AI apps are starting to reach scale, but struggle with retention and differentiation.

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Foundation models are a type of generative AI model characterized by their large scale and ability to perform multiple tasks. These models are trained on vast amounts of diverse and unstructured data, allowing them to learn a wide range of patterns and relationships. Foundation models are often pre-trained on general tasks and can be fine-tuned for specific applications, making them highly versatile and adaptable. Here’s a list of foundation models and examples including OpenAI’s GPT-3 and Google’s BERT, which have been used for natural language processing, image generation, and more.

Finally, the actual tax calculations could (and should) be done on a traditional engine that’s outside the bounds of an LLM, thus guaranteeing the accuracy of the outputs. You either want to be able to generate better quality with the same amount of time, or generate the same quality but faster. One of the most successful generative AI tools at large is Runwayml.com, because it brings together a broad suite of creator tools in a single package. Currently there is no such platform serving video games, and we think this is an overlooked opportunity.

Ukrainian deeptech Zibra AI receives $500K from a16z Speedrun for its innovative technology

And most model providers, though responsible for the very existence of this market, haven’t yet achieved large commercial scale. Currently, the image qualities produced by these models are on par with those produced by human artists and graphic designers, and we’re approaching photorealism. As of this writing, the compute cost to create an image using a large image model is roughly $.001 and it takes around 1 second. Doing a Yakov Livshits similar task with a designer or a photographer would cost hundreds of dollars (minimum) and many hours or days (accounting for work time, as well as schedules). Even if, for simplicity’s sake, we underestimate the cost to be $100 and the time to be 1 hour, generative AI is 100,000 times cheaper and 3,600 times faster than the human alternative. For the past 5 years, many consumer apps have been caught in an acquisition game.

This will drive a bigger cost delta between the status quo and the AI alternative. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are an extreme but illustrative example of why AI is hard for startups. So while there are many reasons to move to AVs, including safety, efficiency, and traffic management, the economics Yakov Livshits are still not quite there when compared to ride-sharing services, let alone just driving yourself. This is despite an estimated $75 billion having been invested in AV technology. With generative AI applications and foundation models (or frontier models), however, things look very different.

Perhaps the clearest takeaway for model providers, so far, is that commercialization is likely tied to hosting. Hosting services for open-source models (e.g. Hugging Face and Replicate) are emerging as useful hubs to easily share and integrate models — and even have some indirect network effects between model producers and consumers. There’s also a strong hypothesis that it’s possible to monetize through fine-tuning and hosting agreements with enterprise customers.

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

Sign up for commentary and analysis on recent news, and compelling trends in the fintech space. Finally, there are a large number of use cases that demand deterministic outputs. These examples include everything from financial projections to tax calculations to driving directions—essentially any field that requires a definite answer to set inputs. Some parts of our market map are very crowded already, like Animations or Speech & Dialog, but other areas are wide open.

Series AI’s founder, Pany Haritatos, is no stranger to harnessing the power of major shifts in the games industry. When Flash was enabling game developers to rapidly build and test web games, Pany founded a browser game studio that eventually sold to Zynga. At Kongregate, where he later assumed the role of CEO after selling the company to MTG, he gained firsthand insight into how the rise of mobile devices placed games in the hands of hundreds of millions of new players. Most recently, Pany led the games group at Snap that focused on the emerging platforms like augmented reality and embedded games. That’s why we are delighted to announce that A16Z GAMES is leading the seed investment in Series AI – a game studio and technology company that is reinventing the future of game development with generative AI. In our view, AI has the potential to enable entirely new categories of games and we believe that Series AI is poised to lead the way.

A16Z: How generative AI is revolutionizing game development

The startup will eventually make it possible to use multiple inputs like text to direct the action and add characters, audio, and the beginning/ending frames users can upload, according to Sood. That’s because the large language models that power generative AI tools can do so much more than just write language. They can understand commands, which in turn can translate to capabilities in even more sophisticated knowledge work (like coding). “The potential size of this market is hard to grasp — somewhere between all software and all human endeavors — so we expect many, many players and healthy competition at all levels of the stack.” Also known as “Akiba,” Liam is a reporter, editor and podcast producer at CryptoSlate. He believes that decentralized technology has the potential to make widespread positive change.

• We’re already seeing AI tools like Scenario and Iliad that create game assets, as well as platforms like Promethean that can build entire virtual worlds.
• Text generator ChatGPT surpassed 1 million users in just five days, and tens of millions of consumers have created AI avatars.
• The potential for how AI may change the way we work is endless, but we are still in the early innings.
• Our view is that AI companions will soon become commonplace with agents entering our everyday social sphere.

Certain parts of the video are not far off from the Wave 2 examples we described. Similarly, we’re already seeing new startups exclusively focused on trying to automate as much of the outbound sales process as possible with an AI-first approach. At the same time, we’re already seeing new startups exclusively focused on using AI to summarize user feedback, by integrating with existing platforms that are collecting the raw feedback.

The use cases are everywhere—from writing essays to creating comics to editing films—and adoption has outpaced every consumer tech trend of the past decade. Text generator ChatGPT surpassed 1 million users in just five days, and tens of millions of consumers have created AI avatars. A generative AI company building large language models for healthcare to combat the healthcare worker shortage. Challengers like Oracle have made inroads with big capex expenditures and sales incentives. And a few startups, like Coreweave and Lambda Labs, have grown rapidly with solutions targeted specifically at large model developers. They also expose more granular resource abstractions (i.e. containers), while the large clouds offer only VM instances due to GPU virtualization limits.

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API Token page. Co-founder Seung-Yoon Lee, formerly the mind behind mobile serial fiction platform Radish, cited the example of a viral song that used AI-generated voices of Drake and the Weeknd. The song was taken down by Universal Music Group, illustrating the rising tension between creative freedom and copyright laws. Story Protocol’s new blockchain technology targets to be a diverse content intellectual property storehouse.

It’s still early and compensation for content creators needs to be properly worked out. Microsoft is already working on an AI copilot for Minecraft – which uses DALL-E and Github Copilot to enable players to inject assets and logic into a Minecraft session via natural language prompts. What makes this behavior possible is that LLMs are trained on data from the social web, and thus have in their models the building blocks for how humans talk to one another and behave in various social contexts. And within an interactive digital environment like a sim game, these responses can be triggered to create incredibly lifelike emergent behavior. While data moats tend to get the most attention in the AI defensibility debate, this latest cycle in generative AI also introduces other new potential vectors of defensibility. Character.AI has a product network effect such that, as users experience the product, that usage becomes training data that feeds into improving the product experience.