April

3 events

Editors' summary

DALL·E 2 and PaLM arrive days apart, and Anthropic raises big

On 6 April, OpenAI announced DALL·E 2. Switching to a diffusion model brought a large jump in resolution and fidelity over the previous year's DALL·E. Access started by invitation only, kept narrow out of concern about misuse.

On the 4th, Google announced PaLM, at 540 billion parameters, trained on its new Pathways infrastructure. Having the model write out its reasoning, Google showed, lifted its scores on hard problems.

On the 29th, Anthropic raised $580 million in its Series B — a large round a year after the company was founded.

This block is written by the editors. It is kept separate from the sourced record below.

Record3 events

4
ModelGoogle / Jeff Dean / Noam Shazeer
Google announces PaLM, a 540-billion-parameter model
Google announced the Pathways Language Model (PaLM), a 540-billion-parameter decoder-only Transformer trained on 780 billion tokens of high-quality text using Pathways, a system for efficiently training a single model across multiple TPU v4 pods. Evaluated on hundreds of language understanding and generation tasks, it set new few-shot state of the art on most of them, often by wide margins, and reached 57.8% hardware FLOPs utilization — the highest for a model of that scale at the time. It also demonstrated large gains on reasoning tasks from chain-of-thought prompting. As research it was at the frontier, but it was never released as a consumer product; its successor, PaLM 2, would be used as the basis for Bard in May 2023.
6
ModelOpenAI
DALL·E 2 announced, a leap in image generation with diffusion
OpenAI announced DALL·E 2, an image generation AI that uses a diffusion process to create realistic images and art from natural language descriptions, with 4x the resolution of the original DALL·E introduced in 2021. It added context-aware edits to existing images and the ability to generate variations of an original. Initially released as a limited, waitlist-based research preview to validate safety mitigations, it became one of the sparks of that year's image generation AI boom.
29
BusinessAnthropic / Sam Bankman-Fried / Caroline Ellison / Dario Amodei
Anthropic raises $580 million Series B
Anthropic announced a $580 million Series B led by Sam Bankman-Fried, then CEO of the crypto exchange FTX, with participation from Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh, James McClave, Jaan Tallinn, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research. The company said the money would fund large-scale experimental infrastructure for probing the safety properties of compute-intensive AI models, tools for inspecting models internally, and teams working on policy and societal impact. It was a large raise barely a year after founding, at a point when Anthropic had shipped no product.

↑ 2022

Google announces PaLM, a 540-billion-parameter model

DALL·E 2 announced, a leap in image generation with diffusion

Anthropic raises $580 million Series B