What makes investors so hyped about AI computer programs that generate pictures and other creative works from prompts? So hyped, that they are willing to invest billions of dollars into such solutions, making them overnight unicorns. Take for example, OpenAI, the most famous startup that develops such technology, which has attracted over $1B in funding from Microsoft and Khosla Ventures. Or the Europe-born Hugging Face which was recently valued at $2B after raising money from high-rank investors including Sequoia Capital.
Well, these image-generating programs could lay the basis for a big new wave in AI technology called generative AI. The current state of AI development has almost excelled at its capacity to work with existing data and models to provide analytics and perform autonomous activities. The promise of generative AI is its capacity to produce something entirely new powered by such a complex technology that we, humans, call creativity.
But the potential of generative AI goes far beyond the creative and arts industries. Just a couple of days ago, Sequoia Capital published a research piece stating that generative AI has the potential to generate trillions of dollars of economic value. According to the VC firm, generative AI can soon change every field that requires humans to create original work – from gaming, marketing, and sales, to website building, coding, and law. What’s fun about it, is that the piece was co-written with GPT-3, the natural language product or OpenAI, and featured illustrations generated with Midjourney.
Right now, the US and Western Europe are at the forefront of generative AI development, as the most prominent startups in the field – OpenAI, Stability AI, Hugging Face, Jasper, Replikr, and Midjourney. But as you can judge from this list collected by a Stanford researcher, the number of generative AI startups is rapidly increasing.
Let’s see who are the generative AI shapers in Central Europe, building the new normal of human-computer co-creation. If you think of a name that would fit into this list, please reach out to [email protected].
Aris Konstantinidis
Company: OpenAI
The Greece-born Aris Konstantinidis is one of the founding members of the Biz Ops teams of OpenAI, the research and deployment company that aims to make AI available for general-purpose use. Since he joined the company in 2019, he has been responsible for organizational planning and leading cross-functional company-wide initiatives. Prior to becoming part of OpenAI, he has been involved with building his NGO startup for volunteerism Ethalon. He has been running Ethalon for the past 9 years with the mission to make it the hub for volunteering in Greece.
Mira Murati
Company: OpenAI
Mira Murati is the Albanian CTO of OpenAI. She oversees research, product development, and deployment at OpenAI, to advance the company’s mission to ensure that general-purpose AI benefits all of humanity. Prior to joining OpenAI, she led the design, development, and launch of vehicle products at Tesla Motors.
Todor Markov
Company: OpenAI
Todor Markov is a Bulgarian deep learning earning researcher who is part of the Applied AI Technical team of OpenAI, where he works on making large generative models safer. He has been involved in the release of OpenAI’s GPT-3, OpenAI API, and Improved Content Moderation Tooling.
Batuhan Özcan
Company: Syntonym
Born in Turkey, Batuhan Özcan is a graduate from The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Imperial College London. He is the founder and CEO of Syntonym, a startup that provides a Generative AI-based Synthetic Anonymization solution, to create advanced use cases for businesses. The startup has a team of 16 people, more than half from which are based in Turkey.
