Text-to-image has advanced at a breathless pace in 2021 - 2022, starting with DALL·E, then DALL·E 2, Imagen, and now Stable Diffusion. OG image prompt: "a robot holding a paint brush painting on an art stand" Let's start with the earliest diffusion paper I know, cryptically titled "Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics, by Sohl-Dickstein in 2015. In it, the authors explained that the idea of diffusion was inspired by non-equilibrium statistical physics (perhaps the particle physics concept with the same name?) The key idea is to gradually destroy structure in a data distribution (e.g., image) via a forward diffusion process, and then learn a reverse diffusion process (via a model) to restore the structure in the data. And once we have a trained model, we can generate images by starting from pure noise and applying reverse diffusion (aka sampling). To implement forward diffusion, they apply a Markov chain that progressively adds Gaussian noise to the data until the signal is destroyed (i.e., complete noise).

Applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) research company Runway announced a $50M Series C funding round led by Felicis. Existing investors Amplify Partners, Coatue, Compound, and Lux Capital participated, along with new investor Madrona. The funding allows the company to enter the next phase of growth and advance their position in generative AI, with research on multimodal AI systems for content creation. With customers like CBS, New Balance, Harbor Picture Company, and Publicis as customers, Runway continues to be on the leading edge of generative AI. "As content needs continue to skyrocket, creators will become overwhelmed by the volume of rote tasks their jobs require. Runway is pushing the boundaries of creativity and enabling creators to meet these demands and enhance their craft, while saving enterprises and creatives significant amounts of time and money with recent advancements in AI." Runway CEO and Co-founder Cristóbal Valenzuela said in a company release.

Have you heard of ChatGPT yet? It's a thrilling, vexing, ontologically mesmerizing new technology created by the research group OpenAI. It can solve all your problems and answer all your questions. Or at least it will try to. In essence, ChatGPT is a bot trained to generate human-like responses to user inputs.

More than three years ago, this editor sat down with Sam Altman for a small event in San Francisco soon after he'd left his role as the president of Y Combinator to become CEO of the AI company he co-founded in 2015 with Elon Musk and others, OpenAI. At the time, Altman described OpenAI's potential in language that sounded outlandish to some. Altman said, for example, that the opportunity with artificial general intelligence -- machine intelligence that can solve problems as well as a human -- is so great that if OpenAI managed to crack it, the outfit could "maybe capture the light cone of all future value in the universe." He said that the company was "going to have to not release research" because it was so powerful. Asked if OpenAI was guilty of fear-mongering -- Musk has repeatedly called all organizations developing AI to be regulated -- Altman talked about the dangers of not thinking about "societal consequences" when "you're building something on an exponential curve."

If it becomes impossible to distinguish truth from fiction, will readers become more willing to pay for human judgment they can trust? Tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT threaten to disrupt everything from academia (undetectable cheating) to Google (the AI agent is already more useful than a search engine for some queries). For journalists, it is potentially an existential threat, because OpenAI's technology can generate serviceable content with very little input.

Microsoft invested $1 billion in the AI company, and OpenAI said it would exclusively license its technology with the tech company. "The scope of commercial and creative potential that can be unlocked through the GPT-3 model is profound, with genuinely novel capabilities – most of which we haven't even imagined yet," Microsoft said in a blog post. "Directly aiding human creativity and ingenuity in areas like writing and composition, describing and summarizing large blocks of long-form data (including code), converting natural language to another language – the possibilities are limited only by the ideas and scenarios that we bring to the table," it said. The partnership allows Microsoft to compete with Google's DeepMind AI company.

The new AI tool ChatGPT has inspired excitement and worry with its ability to instantly answer complex questions. In the days after its debut, people have discovered many ways it can make their lives easier -- including five we've found that rise above the rest. ChatGPT is a chat-based tool built by research lab OpenAI that answers questions with somewhat conversational dialogue. Its natural language abilities will delight anyone who's had to rephrase questions to get answers out of Siri or Alexa. The AI, trained on the vast tracts of text available on the internet, knows about information only through 2021.

In today's newsletter, I'll explain the potential benefits of artificial intelligence but also why some experts worry it could be dangerous. The upside of artificial intelligence is that it might be able to accomplish tasks faster and more efficiently than any person can. The possibilities are up to the imagination: self-driving and even self-repairing cars, risk-free surgeries, instant personalized therapy bots and more. The technology is not there yet. But it has advanced in recent years through what is called machine learning, in which bots comb through data to learn how to perform tasks. In ChatGPT's case, it read a lot.

Over the weekend, experimenters discovered that OpenAI's new chatbot, ChatGPT, can hallucinate simulations of Linux shells and role-play dialing into a bulletin board system (BBS). The chatbot, based on a deep-learning AI model, uses its stored knowledge to simulate Linux with surprising results, including executing Python code and browsing virtual websites. Last week, OpenAI made ChatGPT freely available during a testing phase, which has led to people probing its capabilities and weaknesses in novel ways. I want you to act as a Linux terminal. I will type commands and you will reply with what the terminal should show.

ChatGPT launched few days ago and it already has over 1 million users . ChatGPT is a cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) technology developed by OpenAI. It uses advanced machine learning algorithms to generate human-like responses to user inputs in real time.