A Coming-Out Party for Generative A.I., Silicon Valley’s New Craze

“So much of the world is creatively constipated, and we’re going to make it so that they can poop rainbows,” he said.

If this all sounds eerily familiar, it’s because Mr. Mostaque’s pitch echoes the utopian dreams of an earlier generation of tech founders, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter. Those men also raced to put powerful new technology into the hands of billions of people, barely pausing to consider what harm might result.

When I asked Mr. Mostaque if he worried about unleashing generative A.I. on the world before it was safe, he said he didn’t. A.I. is progressing so quickly, he said, that the safest thing to do is to make it publicly available, so that communities — not big tech companies — can decide how it should be governed.

Ultimately, he said, transparency, not top-down control, is what will keep generative A.I. from becoming a dangerous force.

“You can interrogate the data sets. You can interrogate the model. You can interrogate the code of Stable Diffusion and the other things we’re doing,” he said. “And we’re seeing it being improved all the time.”

His vision of an open-source A.I. utopia might seem fantastical, but on Monday night, he found plenty of people who wanted to make it real.

“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” said Peter Wang, an Austin-based tech executive who was in town for the party. “But you can at least have everyone look at the genie.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/21/technology/generative-ai.html