What's better than OpenAI? Developers shop for alternatives
Microsoft-backed OpenAI is no longer the only game in town for software developers looking to capitalize on an expected $90 billion market for artificial intelligence.
Motivated by a wariness of relying on a single company, a desire for models tailored to specific tasks and the chance to cut costs, more than a dozen startups and investors said they are embracing competitors to industry leader OpenAI, casting a shadow on expectations that Microsoft Corp and OpenAI will dominate the young field.
The shift by some software developers toward alternative AI foundation models shows how the next chapter of generative AI - defined as technology capable of generating text, images, or other media in response to prompts - might unfold.
George Mathew, an AI investor at Insight Partners, compared the AI foundation models to other technological breakthroughs which spawned competition. Foundation models are AI systems that are trained on large sets of data with the ability to learn to perform a variety of tasks.
“Did we only have a single internet service provider?" Mathew said. "In a similar manner, we will need multiple foundational model providers for a healthy functioning ecosystem.”
He added: "The current head start that OpenAI has will not make it the only choice."
AI storytelling startup Tome, which helps users build slides faster, was originally built on GPT-3, a foundation model first released by OpenAI in 2020. Tome said it has hit 3 million users this month, and it started to experiment with other models.
It has added a text model from OpenAI rival Anthropic to the mix, and plans to move from DALL-E, OpenAI's photo generation model, to open-source model Stable Diffusion, which is made by Stability AI.
The goal is to find the model
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