Top AI Achievements of 2024 (part 1)

DALL-E-3 and improved image generation

OpenAI’s most recent version of their ground-breaking text-to-image generating model, DALL-E 3, immediately became one of the ai accomplishments in computer vision. New capabilities like inpainting, which lets users change particular areas of an image by showing text modifications, have been added to DALL-E-3. This gives image production a new degree of control and accuracy. DALL-E-3’s legendary zero-shot capabilities, which enable it to produce incredibly imaginative and detailed images from even abstract or fantastical descriptions, remains present in the model.

How does it work? Building on the same framework as its predecessors, DALL-E-3 combines a large dataset of paired text and images with autoregressive transformers. Like natural language models, the model interprets input sequences as tokens, which it then uses to create or modify images. For instance, inpainting makes use of this tokenization to alter only specific areas of the image while maintaining the overall image’s coherence. DALL-E-3 can produce intricate and imaginative images from natural language descriptions because it has been trained on billions of text-image pairs.

Why is it innovative? By improving image editing accuracy and expanding its capacity to manage intricate, sophisticated requests, DALL-E-3 expands on the innovation. It is perfect for real-world applications where customization is required because of the new inpainting functionality. Even in extremely strange situations, DALL-E-3 may produce visuals with unparalleled coherence, detail, and inventiveness because of transformer-based approaches, as opposed to GAN-based models. The model can produce entirely original visuals, which could help digital artists with problems like copyright infringement.

A cross-section view of an engine (source)

Use Cases: Because of its outstanding performance, DALL-E-3 has lots of use cases. It can be used in advertising, publishing, journalism, social media, etc., to create all types of illustrations: from mock-ups to complete designs. DALL-E might even solve the problem of copyrighting, as it can create unique images for any purpose, whether it is for a school project, a musical album cover, or an advertising campaign. Finally, this model can generate design ideas: there is no need to draw sketches anymore; you can simply write your thoughts as a text and choose the best option DALL-E -3 produces. For example, being a furniture designer, wouldn’t you find some of those armchairs in the shape of a Rubik’s cube awesome?

Companies that use it: DALL-E-3 is integrated into Microsoft’s new graphic design tool, Microsoft Designer, which allows users to generate high-quality social media posts, invitations, and other visual content. DALL-E is also used in Bing Image Creator to help users generate images when web results fall short.

CLIP

CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) is another neural network developed by OpenAI. It provides a powerful bridge between computer vision and natural language processing and opens many new opportunities. CLIP was designed to solve some of the main computer vision problems, including labor-intensive and costly labeling for datasets, low adaptability to new tasks, and poor real-world performance. Unlike traditional classification models, CLIP does not recognize the objects on an image but provides the most appropriate description. This approach gives more flexibility and robustness to non-standard datasets. CLIP outperformed the older ImageNet model on 20 out of 26 different datasets tested. Particularly interesting is its result on an adversarial dataset that is explicitly designed for confusing AI models. 77.1% accuracy is an incredible result which proves CLIP to be robust to previously unseen images, showcasing its advancement in machine learning classification algorithms.

Comparison of ImageNet and CLIP on various datasets (source)

How does it work? CLIP was trained on 400 million image-text pairs. These are images found on the Internet and their captions. For example, a picture of a puppy sitting on the grass with the phrase “A photo of a puppy on the grass.” The model consists of two sub-models: a text encoder and an image encoder. Each of these converts texts or images into a mathematical space (vector representation). These vector representations allow us to compare how close the objects are. Ideally, the phrase “A photo of a puppy on the grass” must be as close to the picture of a puppy sitting on the grass as possible. This is precisely what happens during the training phase. The model tries to maximize the similarity between texts and their corresponding images. As a result, we receive a matrix with corresponding texts and pictures on the main diagonal (their similarity must be as high as possible) and unrelated texts and images elsewhere (their similarities must be as low as possible). Once the model is trained, we can get a text describing the image.

CLIP’s pretraining phase (source)

Why is it innovative? CLIP differs from other computer vision models in several ways. First of all, it does not need to construct a specific dataset, as it is already trained on a massive number of images taken from the Internet. As a result, no additional human effort is required. Secondly, CLIP has impressive zero-shot capabilities where a model can perform well on tasks it has never seen before. It utilizes semantics extracted from the text to add value to the images, making it possible to use CLIP for many different purposes without fine-tuning. It is different from the usual classification model that simply enumerates the classes and does not use the information provided by the text. Lastly, CLIP learns from unfiltered and noisy data, which adds to its flexibility and robustness and increases its accuracy on real-world data. 

Use Cases: Even though it’s been only four months since the release of CLIP, there are several exciting applications already. This project uses CLIP to create a text-based interface for another model (StyleGAN), which, in turn, can generate and manipulate images. The result of its work can be a picture of a celebrity with another hairstyle. Also, this project can help you find a particular moment in a video by just entering its description and providing the video link. Another application would be a CLIP model in a Pictionary judge’s role, where it can decide how similar a picture is to the phrase. Finally, CLIP can be used as a discriminator for DALL-E (described above). Among many images generated by DALL-E, CLIP can choose the ones that correspond to the prompt the most, thus creating a robust image generation pipeline.

The result of StyleGAN+CLIP image manipulation (source)

Companies that use it: Shutterstock uses CLIP to support the functionality of its AI-powered tools, particularly for generating and recognizing image content. CLIP helps Shutterstock’s users search for images by combining text and image inputs, improving the relevance of search results.

SEER

SEER (SElf-supERvised) is a self-supervised billion parameter computer vision model developed by Facebook AI. It can learn from any random set of images found on the Internet and does not need any preprocessing or labeling, which distinguishes it from all previous computer vision models. SEER was pre-trained on a billion random images publicly available on Instagram and reached an 84.2% accuracy on ImageNet, exceeding prior results. The model has also demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on various tasks, including object detection, segmentation, image classification, etc.

Comparison of SEER and other algorithms accuracy on ImageNet (source)

How does it work? Two major components are required to make SEER work efficiently with complex images. The first one is an algorithm that can work with a large number of pictures without labels. A new algorithm SwAV is used for this purpose. It can cluster related visual concepts quickly to make use of their similarities. The second component is a convolutional neural network that could effectively work with large and complex data without losing accuracy. RegNet models fit this need perfectly. They are capable of scaling to billions of parameters and show incredible accuracy. Lastly, Facebook AI also released an all-purpose library for self-supervised learning used for the development of SEER.

Two components of SEER (source)

Why is it innovative? SEER has proved self-supervised learning to be a powerful instrument in AI’s development. It allows us to use the data that already exists in the world rather than specifically preparing it. This opens new possibilities for future AI research and allows for much more efficient real-world data usage. Training the models on real-life data increases its accuracy and ability to generalize, while simultaneously saving time and money that would otherwise be wasted on manual data preparation and labeling. Apart from that, self-supervised learning mitigates the biases that might arise during data annotation, problem definition in project becomes more flexible with self-supervised learning approaches.

Use Cases: SEER can be used for safety matters, such as identifying and removing hate or racist images rapidly. Aside from that, the model can potentially be used to automatically generate the description for images and better categorization of items sold. Finally, SEER’s efficiency and speed enable it to be used for medical purposes, including disease diagnosis.

Companies that use it: Currently, SEER is primarily used by Meta for research purposes and to enhance its internal products, such as Instagram and Facebook, where it improves content moderation and personalized recommendations. Meta has also released the VISSL library, enabling other researchers and developers to apply SEER’s self-supervised learning techniques in various domains.  

WaveNet

DeepMind created WaveNet, a deep generative model for producing unprocessed audio waveforms, particularly for speech and music. Instead of depending on conventional speech synthesis methods, it directly models sounds at the waveform level in an effort to create more realistic-sounding audio.

How does it work? WaveNet models the probability distribution of each individual audio sample using a convolutional neural network (CNN), which is conditioned on all prior samples. It creates a high-quality waveform by generating audio one sample at a time. It can mimic different speakers, accents, and even varied sound effects by learning from vast volumes of data.

Why is it innovative? WaveNet surpasses conventional techniques like parametric speech synthesis and concatenative synthesis, marking a substantial advancement in audio creation.

Use Cases: With its integration into services like Google Assistant and Google Translate, WaveNet has transformed text-to-speech (TTS) systems and produced voice output that sounds far more natural. Its capabilities also include creating music and sound effects for movies and video games, providing rich, high-fidelity audio that can be produced spontaneously without the need for pre-recorded content.

Companies that use it: Google uses WaveNet mostly in their Assistant and TTS products. Its technology has also helped platforms like YouTube improve the quality of their audio. Similar neural network models for voice synthesis have been incorporated into the products of other firms, such Voicery.

A Wavenet model (source)

Honorable Mentions

Apart from DALL-E3, WaveNet, and SEER, there were other AI achievements in 2024. They might not be as significant as these AI accomplishments, but they are still shaping the future of AI, so it is important to know about them as well.

Key AI Trends in 2024

AI in healthcare

By 2024, AI models have greatly increased their capacity to accurately identify conditions like cancer from MRIs, X-rays, and other scans. Better patient outcomes result from the earlier and more accurate diagnosis of illnesses made possible by these models. Physicians may now develop individualized treatment plans more quickly thanks to the broad use of AI in disciplines like pathology and radiology, which is accelerating diagnostic procedures. AI models assist radiologists in the detection of cancer by spotting early-stage cancers that would be hard to spot with the human eye. This enables earlier interventions and better results for patients. These achievements of AI are being used by companies such as GE Healthcare to improve medical imaging and diagnostics, increasing scan speed and accuracy. In order to help healthcare providers identify diseases in their early stages, when therapy is most successful, Google Health also employs AI to analyze medical scans. This is especially useful for early diagnosis of diseases like cancer.

AI-Driven Autonomous Vehicles

In 2024, autonomous vehicles have made significant strides, particularly with companies like Waymo and Tesla deploying AI systems capable of handling more complex driving scenarios with fewer human interventions. Self-driving cars’ safety, navigation, and decision-making skills have improved because of AI’s ability to process real-time data from numerous sensors.

Deep learning, computer vision, and sensor fusion are all used in autonomous cars. The automobile can sense its environment, navigate highways, avoid obstructions, and obey traffic laws in real-time thanks to the AI algorithms that gather data from cameras, LIDAR, radar, and other sensors. The car’s comprehension of urban areas is improved by this sophisticated AI perception system.

AI in in Energy Optimization

In 2024, artificial intelligence (AI) has made tremendous strides in energy management, especially in the areas of smart grid management, energy demand forecasting, and industrial energy usage optimization. In order to combat climate change, AI models are being utilized to improve energy systems’ efficiency and lower carbon emissions. To reduce waste, these models can optimize energy storage, integrate renewable energy sources, and modify power delivery. AI is also involved in smart grid management, guaranteeing effective energy flow according to current demands. While Tesla Energy employs AI to manage its energy storage systems, increasing grid stability and boosting overall energy management, Siemens uses AI to improve industrial energy use, guaranteeing more effective use of resources.

How AI can help power & utilities (source)

Conclusion

We have already witnessed several artificial intelligence accomplishments. DALL-E3 and CLIP are two revolutionary models that connect computer vision and natural language processing. At the same time, SEER has achieved state-of-the-art performance in computer vision and showed the power of self-supervised learning. Other related fields have had several AI accomplishments as well, and Data Science UA team would definitely love to implement them in our services. We can only guess what other amazing things await us in the future and we can be confident that they will change the world.

Updated: 17.10.2024