OpenAI is Pixar
The “wow factor” of each company impressed the masses, but scared creatives.
A breakthrough technology captures the public’s imagination; the disruption threatens multiple creative industries; a feverish race to achieve a futuristic goal once unimaginable begins.
You could say any of these apply to OpenAI, but decades ago, this was how people were talking about computer-graphics pioneer Pixar.
Breakthrough
When Apple founder Steve Jobs purchased Pixar from George Lucas in 1986, the fledgling animation studio was pushing the boundaries of computer-generated imagery.
While crude by today’s standards, nobody had seen anything like their animated short films “Luxo Jr.” or 1989’s “Tin Toy,” which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. (Pixar would go on to win 22 more Academy Awards, and two nominations for Best Picture.)
“Tin Toy” was not just a technical marvel at the time, but showed that these cold, digital pixels could be capable of heartwarming, emotional storytelling. Pixar’s breakthroughs inspired a generation of programmers, digital artists, and creators to build the modern computer-graphics industry — which, incidentally, would also lead to the computing and hardware innovations that made OpenAI possible. In 2006, animation powerhouse Disney purchased Pixar for $7.4 billion.
ChatGPT took the tech world by storm from launch day in November 2022. After decades of progress in foundational AI breakthroughs like convolutional neural networks and transformers, the public finally got a chance to see what these advances could mean for regular people. Reading news coverage of ChatGPT’s initial release from just two years ago feels like stepping into a time machine to a simpler time, like in this breathless New York Times piece:
“Hundreds of screenshots of ChatGPT conversations went viral on Twitter, and many of its early fans speak of it in astonished, grandiose terms, as if it were some mix of software and sorcery.”
Disruption
The “wow factor” of what Pixar was creating at the time impressed artists, technologists, and filmmakers, but it also signaled a disruption. Was the era of hand-drawn animation nearing its end?
In the 1998 book “Computer Animation: A Whole New World,” Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull told author Rita Street:
“Luxo Jr. sent shock waves through the entire industry — to all corners of computer and traditional animation. You see, at that time, most traditional artists were afraid of the computer. They did not realize that the computer was merely a different tool in the artist’s kit but instead perceived it as a type of automation that might endanger their jobs."
A similar thing happened when OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E text-to-image generator popped up in front of creative writers, artists, and journalists, but with an added wrinkle. This time, not only was this startling technology putting their livelihoods at risk, but it was trained on their own copyrighted public works. Rather than shrug it off and accept this as the inevitable future, many creators have filed lawsuits and designed clever adversarial countermeasures.
Holy Grails
Now OpenAI plans to continually and rapidly improve its technology, racing to achieve a lofty goal, as Pixar did.
The engineers and animators at Pixar saw the limitations of their technology at the time, but had their eyes fixed on the future of computer graphics. They wanted to make everything look real.
“We people in computer graphics have known in our bones for 20 years that we would do this,” Pixar cofounder Alvy Ray Smith said in a 1989 New York Times story about the rise of computer animation and the advances that led to “Tin Toy.”
“Our goal is not to have people say, ‘That’s computer animation,’” he said. “Our goal is photorealism.”
OpenAI’s stated mission is to achieve “artificial general intelligence,” (AGI) — loosely defined as advanced AI systems that not just equal but surpass humans in all tasks, which has long been considered the Holy Grail of machine learning.
OpenAI’s mission page states:
“If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility.”
It’s clear that OpenAI’s leadership knows there’s a long road ahead to AGI, and they appear to be unimpressed with what their technology can do today. Earlier this year, OpenAI CEO and cofounder Sam Altman said:
“ChatGPT is mildly embarrassing at best. GPT-4 is the dumbest model any of you will ever have to use again, by a lot.”
Pixar spent decades pushing the boundaries of computer-graphics technology, which is now so common that consumers don’t really think much about it. OpenAI has been on its quest for AGI for nine years, though recently the pace of its breakthroughs is quickening. But one question hangs over OpenAI: is AGI even possible?
