Canva embraces OpenAI as ChatGPT looms as a threat
Online design powerhouse Canva is wise to embed OpenAI’s ChatGPT in its product suite. The revolutionary generative AI software poses a serious threat to its business and its growth could weigh on a Canva IPO in 2023.
Updated Jan 11, 2023 – 1.24pm, first published at 12.01pm
When online design software company Canva was started in a lounge room in 2013 by Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, it proved to be a phenomenally successful challenger to the then reigning software design company of choice, Adobe.
This was a classic David and Goliath tussle of the tech world. At the time, Adobe had a market capitalisation of $US20 billion and Canva, the fledgling start-up from Perth, had just completed its first seed funding round with a valuation of $8 million.
The brilliance of Canva’s challenger product was that it was free to access and much easier to use compared with the clunky and expensive Adobe offering.
Canva won the backing of influential Silicon Valley venture capitalists and went on to become the second Australian $US1 billion unicorn after Atlassian in 2018. In 2021, its valuation soared to $US40 billion.
A decade after the company was founded, Canva’s business model is being challenged by a start-up with the firepower to cause real damage to its IPO prospects.
Canva, whose valuation slumped by about $US14 billion to $US25.6 billion ($37.2 billion) in July last year, is up against OpenAI, the creator of the ChatGPT chatbot. The difference this time around is that the challenger is not a tiny start-up.
OpenAI, which is backed by the personal investment of Microsoft founder Satya Nadela, is reported to be in the midst of raising $US10 billion from Microsoft at a valuation of $US29 billion.
Threat to Google too?
OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence software is being used to generate text, images and software code in response to text prompts. It has been talked about in some tech circles as a threat to Google’s $US250 billion annual search revenue.
The OpenAI tool for generating images is called Dall-E 2 and utilises the ChatGPT software. It is already available for free inside Microsoft’s web search engine Bing and can be used to create images using text prompts.
ChatGPT poses a threat to Canva’s business because it could be attractive to people seeking to generate images for presentations or other online work for free. Canva’s freemium model has evolved to include millions of paying subscribers.
It would be alarmist to suggest that Canva will lose its coveted position as one of the world’s leading suppliers of online design tools that generate an annual revenue of $US1 billion. But it would be worrying if ChatGPT harmed its extraordinary growth rates.
Dall-E 2 could allow people to generate creative images as a baseline for further work by a paid professional.
Chanticleer believes this threat to Canva, which is at a stage in its evolution where it ought to be considering an initial public offering on Nasdaq, explains why it has decided to integrate ChatGPT into its product range.
Lots more here:
https://www.afr.com/chanticleer/canva-embraces-openai-as-it-threatens-its-business-20230110-p5cbhn
That a major tech company like Canva decides to integrate ChatGPT into its core capabilities shows, to me, how important and transformative the present version of ChatGPT we have is, (V3.5 I believe), What are we going to see at version 10 and beyond in a few years? I am sure we are at the beginning of a journey and you can be sure that capabilities will grow and the limitations and issues will progressively be resolved.
In the end I suspect we will see a tool that can basically answer any question asked of it – and that the answer given will be complete and correct – as well as the capability to clearly recognise when it does not know and say so – be it a gap in human knowledge or simply that a question cannot be answered with objective scientific certainty (Does God Exist and the like?).
You do have to wonder, also, will this capability remain free?
I fear most of us normal humans will just
have to watch and wait to see what is next! I suspect we will have a few
surprises along the way with this and other similar technologies! The 'interesting times' of the Chinese proverb?
David.
It is a powerful compiler of content and is needed to fill the internets needs for content, any content. As with all tech there is a wave of excitement. There is also the wave of misuse cases and harm done. It does highlight just how backseats thinking ADHA is compared to its predecessor.
ReplyDeleteMust ask the little ChatGPT what it makes of ADHA