What has been driving the rapid adoption of generative AI tools in recent years, and what is the current state of their evolution?

I first got interested in generative AI when GPT-3 came out in summer of 2020. I couldn't get access to it at the time, but that was the first time it felt like the technology in terms of output quality had crossed some threshold to where it was really useful and usable.

That, combined with the API model that OpenAI chose to go with, allowed a lot more people to use it—instead of having to spin up your own servers.

That was a big breakthrough in terms of tech. And then Stability.AI rolling out an open source text-to-image was really what felt like it opened up the floodgates. It wasn't all consolidated to OpenAI or one company. Now, everyone could play with this and iterate on it.

Now, it just seems like the quality of the output has actually gotten useful. A combination of smart people having breakthroughs, computing costs coming down a bit, and access to GPUs that weren't available before made this a perfect storm.