According to incomplete statistics, there are already 10 AIGC startups with a valuation of more than $1 billion, including OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT, and Midjourney, which became popular due to Space Opera. Who are the entrepreneurs behind these unicorns? How did they become the pioneers of the era? This article will take you to find out.
Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI painting tool.
OpenAI founder Sam Altman
He learned to program at the age of 8, dropped out of Stanford to start a business at the age of 20, and was promoted to the president of the YC incubator at the age of 28.
As a typical genius entrepreneur, "The New Yorker" magazine described OpenAI founder Sam Altman as "the chosen son of YC, Silicon Valley and the future of mankind."
Image source: Scale AI
In 2015, Sam Altman, Musk and others founded the non-profit organization OpenAI.
In 2019, Sam Altman resigned as president of the YC incubator to devote himself to OpenAI.
In January 2021, OpenAI created the text-to-image model DALL-E, and since then many startups have joined the text-to-image track.
In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, and Chinese technology companies followed suit.
In January 2023, Microsoft was negotiating to invest $10 billion in OpenAI, with a post-investment valuation of $29 billion.
In March 2023, OpenAI officially opened the ChatGPT API, with a price of US$2.7 for every 1 million words output, ushering in the era of AIGC for all.
David Holz, Founder of Midjourney
In August 2021, David Holz, former NASA neuroscience researcher and co-founder of AR/VR hardware peripheral company Leap Motion, founded the independent research studio Midjourney with self-funded funds.
Image source: forbes
In July 2022, the Midjourney project entered public beta. In August 2022, the painting "Space Opera" generated by MidJourney defeated a group of human contestants and won the first prize in the art competition.
Currently, Midjourney has 11 full-time employees, over 10 million community members, and annual revenue of approximately $100 million.
Emad Mostaque, Founder of Stability AI
Emad Mostaque is a Bangladeshi who grew up in the UK, graduated from Oxford University with a degree in mathematics and computer science, and worked in hedge funds in London for 13 years.
Image source: Scale AI
In 2020, Emad Mostaque founded Stability AI.
In August 2022, Stability AI released the text-generating image model Stable Diffusion.
In October 2022, Stability AI announced that it had received US$101 million in financing, and its post-investment valuation has climbed to US$1 billion.
Dave Rogenmoser, founder of Jasper AI
Dave Rogenmoser graduated from Kansas State University in 2011. After graduation, Rogenmoser founded several projects, but none of them reached the level of financial freedom.
Dave Rogenmoser (center)
In 2018, Rogenmoser’s company was accepted into Y Combinator.
In 2020, OpenAI launched GPT-3, and Rogenmoser used his connections at Y Combinator to obtain internal testing qualifications.
In January 2021, Dave Rogenmoser launched Jasper AI based on GPT-3, with the initial function of helping people write Facebook ads.
In October 2021, Jasper AI received $85 million in Series A funding. In October 2022, Jasper received $125 million in funding with a valuation of $1.5 billion.
Rogenmoser's dream has also risen from making money to support his family to providing superpowers to every company and every employee on Earth and even Mars by building an AI content platform.
Dario Amodei, founder of Anthropic
Dario Amodei holds a BA from California Institute of Technology and Stanford University, and a PhD from Princeton University.
Image source: Future of Life Institute
Dario Amodei worked for a period of time at Baidu and Google, with each work experience not exceeding 1 year.
In July 2016, Dario Amodei joined OpenAI and served as head of the AI safety research group, research director, and vice president of research.
In December 2020, Dario Amodei left OpenAI.
In February 2021, Dario Amodei teamed up with his sister Daniela, former vice president of security and policy at OpenAI, to establish Anthropic.
On February 4, 2023, Google Cloud, the cloud computing division of Google, announced a partnership with Anthropic. Google invested approximately US$300 million in Anthropic, and Anthropic will be deeply integrated with Google's cloud computing platform.
AIGC Entrepreneurs in China
As the influence of ChatGPT grows, the call for a "Chinese version of ChatGPT" is getting louder. However, except for large companies like Baidu that have accumulated technology and data resources, the development prospects of small companies do not seem clear.
On the one hand, since the 1990s, domestic Internet startups have almost all been doing it in the way of "model innovation", such as Baidu (borrowing from Google), Taobao (borrowing from eBay), Tencent QQ (borrowing from ICQ), Meituan (borrowing from Groupon), etc. The advantage of model innovation is that you don't have to use your brain, just use the ready-made technology to find a landing business scenario, and the realization path is short. However, the path of "technological innovation" is difficult to see results in the short term and is not cost-effective. In the past few decades, based on China's huge demographic dividend, "model innovation" entrepreneurial projects are more likely to succeed. However, with China's first negative population growth in 2022, the entrepreneurial model based on the demographic dividend has come to an end. And the 30-year-old deep-rooted "model innovation" thinking is difficult to change in the short term. It is not cost-effective for AIGC entrepreneurs to develop algorithm models from scratch, and it is difficult to form product barriers using other companies' open source models. This has led investors to be cautious about domestic AIGCs, unwilling to give high valuations or even unwilling to invest money.
On the other hand, 2018 became a watershed for the domestic Internet entrepreneurship wave. In this year, the once hot Internet financial innovation P2P platform collapsed in succession, long-term rental apartments collapsed in succession, the darlings of the sharing economy, Mobike and OfO, were sold or closed down, and Chinese stocks listed in the United States were bleeding. A series of factors such as the game between major powers, financial deleveraging, capital winter, and the disappearance of the demographic dividend made 2018 a turning point in the era, and also changed the mentality of young people and entrepreneurs. The epidemic that lasted for three years is finally over, but the employment and entrepreneurship atmosphere has changed. When the entrepreneurial heroes who were once worshipped on the altar were knocked down, and when an industry could be eliminated by a ban, the culture of "lying flat" and "involution" gradually became popular, and taking the civil service exam and entering the establishment gradually became the first choice for graduates. When young people in Silicon Valley in the United States are talking about how to change the world, our young people are discussing "how a 30-year-old master can use 1 million to live in Yunnan in a lying-flat retirement style."
Finally, we keep issuing industrial policies, but strangely, they don’t seem to be effective. In 2019, blockchain was an important breakthrough for independent innovation of core technologies, and many places issued action plans for the development of the blockchain industry. In 2021, Meta all in the metaverse, and various places in China issued action plans for the development of the metaverse industry. Looking back, apart from central enterprises and state-owned enterprises, large Internet companies, and shell companies that fleece the government, how many real startups have grown up?
This time, the AIGC craze is here again, and perhaps relevant industrial policies will be promulgated soon, but will our AIGC unicorn entrepreneurs come?