Opinion
Prepare for a deluge of clever tools spawned by generative AI
Summary
Their application as professional aids by artists, engineers and others could prove transformative.
Large language models (LLM) are in the limelight for the stunning mass adoption of their poster boy, ChatGPT. Racing to 100 million users in two months since its public launch, ChatGPT has set off an arms race in Big Tech, with every company readying its own LLM and ChatGPT-killer. Microsoft has a head-start integrating ChatGPT into its products, while Google, Meta, Amazon and Baidu have all introduced their own. All this is incredibly exciting. But the real value is in the ‘verticals’ that these horizontal models are spawning. Startups building products on these foundation models are mushrooming, with almost 500 of them having attracted funding. I liken horizontals to the cloud, on which software companies build their products. Perhaps going forward, we will have three LLM providers dominating this space, much like Microsoft, Amazon and Google do today and hundreds of companies building generative AI (GenAI) products on them.
While a new GenAI product bubbles up almost every day, here are a few that I have selected, some of which I actually use, that are the promising early ones:
Elicit.org: This is for academics. While Google Scholar is a great tool for finding the right academic papers and books, you can ask Elicit a research question like: “Does Vedanta school of Indian philosophy influence how Indians think of privacy and surveillance impact of AI?" and Elicit throws up relevant papers and abstracts that might have addressed this question. It will not write it for me, but it is super useful to help with my Cambridge Masters dissertation.
Typical.me, Personal, Character: These create AI avatars of yourself and/or of any historical or present characters. So you can have an AI persona of Mahatma Gandhi or Elon Musk and then have a conversation with them; they will reply in a Gandhian or Muskian manner. You could create an AI avatar of yourself, with your own quirks, and put it out for people to have conversations with ‘you’.
Paraphrase, TLDR This, Quillbot and a host of others can be used to paraphrase and summarize long text. It is very useful for college students, editors, authors, professors and people like you and me who do not have the time to read long text. They can be used to summarize long articles, academic papers, podcast transcripts. One of the most interesting is Detangle, which presumably ‘translates’ arcane legal text to normal English.
Copy, Jasper, Cohere and scores of others are great to generate textual content. Copy is best used for generating ad copy, Jasper is very good for marketing content, Cohere Generate helps you generate ideas and content and can even help you find trends and patterns in large bodies of text. Runway has created a next generation content creation suite of products across text and images. Powerpresent enables you to create impactful presentations, and Github Copilot is one of the most useful products helping developers write code.
Then there are the text-to-media generators. DALL E2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are famous for converting text prompts to fabulously surreal images. But it goes beyond that. Synthesia creates videos from plain text in minutes, Google and Meta also have a text-to-video beta out. Murf does text to speech, while both Google and OpenAI are beta-testing MusicLM and Jukebox, which will convert text to music.
There are many others. Chatsonic and Youchat are like ChatGPT on steroids; a lot of students are using them for their term essays. Altered allows you to alter your voice to sound like you always wanted to. Tome is a storytelling product that can create entire narratives and plots from good prompts. The very aptly named Donotpay is a robot lawyer, Poised is a robot coach.
It is impossible to keep track of all of them. Many are dreading what GenAI products like ChatGPT will do to our jobs. AI will definitely have an impact and might steal some jobs. However, for the vast majority, it can help enhance our work if we embrace and use it as the powerful tool it is meant to be. A software engineer can use it to generate mundane parts of code. A student can use it to generate ideas for a school essay and put it together. A consultant can generate possible solutions for a client problem and then use one’s experience and expertise to offer a better answer. Graphic designers and artists can use it for art ideas and work on the ones they like. Thus, people who learn how to use ChatGPT and other generative models will have an advantage over those who do not, much like engineers using scientific calculators or most of us using computers do over people who do not.
Remember, AI and ChatGPT will not replace you, but people using them may.
Jaspreet Bindra is a technology expert, author of ‘The Tech Whisperer’, and is currently pursuing his Masters in AI and Ethics from Cambridge University
