Building a startup with generative AI? Here are 4 things you need to understand

Intelligence has been democratized over the last few years with the advances in AI, but the shift that we have seen in generative AI space since the release of GPT-3 is unprecedented. This short period 2020–2022 is going to go down in the history and people will look back to it and compare it to the launch of the iPhone. As a Sequoia partner put it “just as mobile unleashed new types of applications through new capabilities like GPS, cameras, and on-the-go connectivity, we expect these large models to motivate a new wave of generative AI applications.”

The pace of innovation in this field is rapid and despite knowing the tricks to keep myself abreast, I still struggle with it. Startups will face the same challenge. Companies started building with GPT-2, but then soon GPT-3 came out. Beyond that InstructGPT and Bloom (open source) came out. In near future, we will have even more multimodal models that will come out. Winning players will build around the technology curve, start early with limited capability of models, and be nimble to stay with the curve, if not ahead of the curve.

Google won the mobile OS market (with Android) and model training market (with TensorFlow) because it chose open. In the AI world, builders are building with models available from OpenAI and Stability while Google and Meta let their high-class models and distribution advantage go to waste. Builders are itching to build and they won’t wait for the BigTech to get their sh*t together. Being in the high castle (at Google), I, unfortunately, saw firsthand, how conservative Google was in releasing the models and giving access to developers. This is a big opportunity for platform players to put their stake in the ground and win.

React Native, Swift, and Flutter were the buzzwords for the mobile-first era. The buzzwords are going to change to fine-tuning, data collection, and quality control in the generative AI era. The ML talent one needs to hire will depend on the type of company they want to build. Below are some broad categories to evaluate what type of talent you should hire:

Other resources below, if you are interested in diving deeper into this space:

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