In the year since OpenAI's ChatGPT debuted, it's taken the world by storm. Reportedly, nearly 49% of companies and over two million developers use the service.

Yet, here at DeepMake, we're not jumping on the ChatGPT bandwagon --- there are several reasons why. One of them being that ChatGPT only runs in the cloud, which adds many complexities even though it makes the model easy to use and widely accessible. We'd rather integrate a cloudless open-source AI model like Stable Diffusion that can run both locally and in the cloud.

There's a common misconception that to even dip your toes into the AI waters, you need to invest in state-of-the-art, high-end hardware. It's easy to understand why people believe this --- after all, until recently, you did need more robust hardware to run most models. 

Just look at Stable Diffusion, a popular open source AI art-generation application. When it was initially released in August 2022, Stable Diffusion needed 16GB of RAM and an Nvidia graphics card with at least 10GB of VRAM. At that time in 2022, the Nvidia RTX 3080 card cost between $900 and $1300.

Now, however, less than two years later, Stable Diffusion's minimum system requirements are a graphics card with just 4GB of VRAM and can run on Windows, MacOS, or Linux operating system. You can pick up an Nvidia Quadro graphics card with 4GB of VRAM on Amazon today for less than $200.

Hello DeepMake fans!

As we power into March, we're excited to share with you our latest product updates and future plans to bring you even more generative AI functionality into your workflow!

DeepMake Version 0.1.2 released

We've recently released the latest version of DeepMake. Version 0.1.2 brings many improvements to the workflow, making using it easier and more powerful than ever:

When personal computers first hit the market, many people resisted them. Even as the machines worked their way into offices and homes, some people thought that computers shouldn't be used in certain ways, like in creating digital art. 

Though you'll still find some holdouts today, most people eventually came around and recognized that art created with the aid of a computer is, indeed, art. Just like accountants use accounting software to crunch numbers at work, and graphic designers everywhere use software like Adobe Illustrator to design images.

Yet we're seeing the "Is it really art?" argument again today with AI. Artists, writers, and creatives of all media are excited about the possibilities that AI opens up to them, while critics have strong feelings about artists using AI as a creative execution tool.

Well, you know what? Here at DeepMake, we're completely on board with people using AI as an artistic tool. Why? Because generative AI isn't capable of imagining new ways of doing, seeing, or feeling things --- aka creating. Only people can do that --- AI simply builds what humans have already imagined.

DeepMake's software is dedicated to supporting AI education and expanding AI access for everyone. As we say on our website, "As an open core company, we believe that open source software democratizes AI development and promotes accessibility, leading to rapid iteration and scaling. True open source — available to anyone regardless of background, industry, or location — enables experimentation without constraints and drives innovation."

When we say we're committed to remaining open source, we mean it. Our software has no behavioral use restrictions, also known as ethical use licenses. 

Furthermore, we don't believe in behavioral licenses. We don't think they're appropriate for open source software and we don't believe they're enforceable. We're here to develop and promote AI tools and techniques, not control users' actions.

Since ChatGPT's launch in 2022, much of the discussion around AI has been in the domain of AI-generated content. The technology is improving efficiency and innovation in leaps and bounds across the software development, marketing, and entertainment industries.

Ever since the term "deepfake" was first coined in 2017 --- describing a type of AI that can create fake but convincing images, audio, and videos --- the media began speculating about how deepfakes could change the world. Fake videos came with the possibility of widespread ethical issues and misuse. If you believed everything you read six years ago, you would have thought that we were headed for a deepfake apocalypse --- a world where seeing is no longer believing and video footage can no longer be trusted.

While AI is one of the hottest trends of the year, it has a dirty little secret: It lies. Okay, it's not really a secret. If you've worked with an AI chatbot like ChatGPT or a text-to-image generator like Stable Diffusion, you've probably seen it hallucinate, or generate a result that was completely unexpected or even blatantly untrue.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer the stuff of science fiction; it has become part of everyday life. In 2022 alone, AI startups received $52.1 billion in funding from 3,396 venture capital deals. Investment figures like this are a strong indicator that AI has great potential to transform our everyday lives.

Rapid growth, however, comes with challenges. In the case of AI, an increasingly pertinent concern is the issue of AI bias. The tech industry has long struggled with diversity and inclusion. According to a 2019 Wired survey, Silicon Valley still suffers from imbalances, with the combined population of Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous individuals making up only 5% of the workforce. In 2023, a staggering 83% of tech executives are white, and only 37% of tech companies have women on their boards. This striking lack of representation extends to AI, where it's estimated that 78% of global professionals possessing AI skills are male, resulting in a significant gender gap in the field.

AI made a big splash this year as the next big thing in technology. Now that AI is famous, it's the target of a lawsuit over copyright infringement. 

On the 19th of September, George R.R. Martin, the Author's Guild and a handful of other authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT. This follows other lawsuits such as one headlined by Sarah Silverman (which also targeted Meta). Between these two lawsuits, the authors allege that OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta's LLaMA were trained on datasets containing illegally acquired copies of the plaintiffs' works. Their lawsuit claims the books were illegally acquired from pirate websites and that they didn't consent to the use of their copyrighted work as training material.