The Future of Image Models Is Multimodal

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Jun 7, 2024

Ideogram CEO Mohammad Norouzi discusses the evolution of transformer models, diffusion models, and the impact on AI technology. He shares insights on transitioning from research to startup CEO, user-centric product development, and fostering creativity with AI in image models.

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ANECDOTE

The Transformer Paper's Surprising Impact

Mohammad discussed the release of the transformer paper with its author, Ashish Vaswani, who saw its importance immediately.
Nobody initially envisioned the transformer architecture would revolutionize both language and vision tasks so broadly.

INSIGHT

Diffusion Models Break New Ground

Diffusion models were a breakthrough over GANs and autoregressive models in creating high-fidelity, diverse images at scale.
Combining diffusion with text-to-image enabled new creative industries with accessible AI tools.

ADVICE

Innovation Easier at Startups

Product innovation is harder in big corporations focused on existing profitable lines like ads.
To truly innovate with AI products like text-to-image, startups have more freedom and focus to succeed.

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In this episode, Ideogram CEO Mohammad Norouzi joins a16z General Partner Jennifer Li, as well as Derrick Harris, to share his story of growing up in Iran, helping build influential text-to-image models at Google, and ultimately cofounding and running Ideogram. He also breaks down the differences between transformer models and diffusion models, as well as the transition from researcher to startup CEO.

Here's an excerpt where Mohammad discusses the reaction to the original transformer architecture paper, "Attention Is All You Need," within Google's AI team:

"I think [lead author Asish Vaswani] knew right after the paper was submitted that this is a very important piece of the technology. And he was telling me in the hallway how it works and how much improvement it gives to translation. Translation was a testbed for the transformer paper at the time, and it helped in two ways. One is the speed of training and the other is the quality of translation.

"To be fair, I don't think anybody had a very crystal clear idea of how big this would become. And I guess the interesting thing is, now, it's the founding architecture for computer vision, too, not only for language. And then we also went far beyond language translation as a task, and we are talking about general-purpose assistants and the idea of building general-purpose intelligent machines. And it's really humbling to see how big of a role the transformer is playing into this."

Learn more:
Investing in Ideogram

Imagen

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

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