Other generative modalities
Since the 2022 ChatGPT moment, most of the technical world has been fascinated by the proposition of generating novel content. While this was always somewhat interesting, the meeting of high-performance foundation models with an abundance of media euphoria over the capabilities, combined with a post-pandemic community with an extremely intense fear of missing out, has led us to the perfect storm of a global fixation on generative AI.
s this a good thing? Honestly, I’m happy to finally see the shift; I’ve been working on generating content with AI/ML models in some fashion since at least 2019, and as a writer and creative person myself, I’ve always thought this was the most interesting part of machine learning. I was very impressed by David Foster’s book (3) on the topic. He’s just published an updated version of this to include the latest foundation models and methods! Let’s quickly recap some other types of modalities...