After initially disabling the capability, OpenAI today announced that customers with access to DALL-E 2 can upload people’s faces to edit them using the AI-powered image-generating system. Previously, OpenAI only allowed users to work with and share photorealistic faces and banned the uploading of any photo that might depict a real person, including photos of prominent celebrities and public figures.
OpenAI claims that improvements to its safety system made the face-editing feature possible by “minimizing the potential of harm” from deepfakes as well as attempts to create sexual, political and violent content. In an email to customers, the company wrote:
Many of you have told us that you miss using DALL-E to dream up outfits and hairstyles on yourselves and edit the backgrounds of family photos. A reconstructive surgeon told us that he’d been using DALL-E to help his patients visualize results. And filmmakers have told us that they want to be able to edit images of scenes with people to help speed up their creative processes … [We] built new detection and response techniques to stop misuse.
The change in policy isn’t opening the floodgates necessarily. OpenAI’s terms of service will continue to prohibit uploading pictures of people without their consent or images that users don’t have the rights to — although it’s not clear how consistent the company’s historically been about enforcing those policies.
In any case, it’ll be a true test of OpenAI’s filtering technology, which some customers in the past have complained about being overzealous and somewhat inaccurate. Deepfakes come in many flavors, from fake vacation photos to presidents of war-torn countries. Accounting for every emerging form of abuse will be a never-ending battle, in some cases with very high stakes.
No doubt, OpenAI — which has the backing of Microsoft and notable VC firms including Khosla Ventures — is eager to avoid the controversy associated with Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, an image-generating system that’s available in an open source format without any restrictions. As TechCrunch recently wrote about, it didn’t take long before Stable Diffusion — which can also edit face images — was being used by some to create pornographic, nonconsensual deepfakes of celebrities like Emma Watson.
So far, OpenAI has positioned itself as a brand-friendly, buttoned-up alternative to the no-holds-barred Stability AI. And with the constraints around the new face editing feature for DALL-E 2, the company is maintaining the status quo.
DALL-E 2 remains in invite-only beta. In late August, OpenAI announced that over a million people are using the service.
OpenAI begins allowing users to edit faces with DALL-E 2 by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
OpenAI begins allowing users to edit faces with DALL-E 2
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As low-code startups continue to attract VC interest, what’s driving customer demand?
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Investor interest in no-code, low-code apps and services advanced another step this morning with Airtable raising an outsized round. The $185 million investment into the popular database-and-spreadsheet service comes as it adds “new low-code and automation features,” per our own reporting.
The round comes after we’ve seen several VCs describe no- and low-code startups as part of their core investing theses, and observed how the same investors appear to be accelerating their investing pace into upstart companies that follow the ethos.
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Undergirding much of the hype around apps that allow users to connect services, mix data sources and commit visual programming is the expectation that businesses will require more customized software than today’s developers will be able to supply. Low-code solutions could limit required developer inputs, while no-code services could obviate some need for developer time altogether. Both no- and low-code solutions could help alleviate the global developer shortage.
But underneath the view that there is a market mismatch between developer supply and demand is the anticipation that businesses will need more apps today than before, and even more in the future. This rising need for more business applications is key to today’s growing divergence between the availability and demand for software engineers.
The issue is something we explored talking with Appian, a public company that provides a low-code service that helps companies build apps.
Today we’re digging a little deeper into the topic, chatting with Mendix CEO Derek Roos. Mendix has reached nine-figure revenues with its low-code platform that helps other companies build apps, meaning that it has good perspective into what the market is actually demanding of itself and its low-code competition.
We want to learn a bit more about why business need so many apps, how COVID-19 has changed the low-code market and if Mendix is accelerating in 2020. If we can get all of that in hand, we’ll be better equipped to understand the growing no- and low-code startup realm.
A growing market
Mendix, based in Boston, raised around $38 million in known venture capital across a few rounds, including a $25 million Series B back in 2014. In 2018, Mendix partnered up with IBM to bring its service to their cloud, and later sold to Siemens for around $700 million the same year.
As low-code startups continue to attract VC interest, what’s driving customer demand?