Chinese company DeepSeek’s generative AI has been kicking ChatGPT’s ass in the Apple App Store this week as the most-downloaded free app, but DeepSeek’s other wonder app was overlooked in the fury of the NASDAQ losing its shit through plunging AI-adjacent company stocks.
ChatGPT wasn’t the only OpenAI platform to take a pounding this week at the hands of DeepSeek. OpenAI’s DALL-E AI 3 image generator, along with Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion XL, both found themselves on the sour side of the news cycle when DeepSeek began to brag that its newly released Janus-Pro AI image generator beats the pants off both of them.
Of course, DeepSeek will say that. They’re a company, and companies love to flatter themselves. But if further investigation into Janus-Pro’s performance bears out those claims, and users seem as over the moon with it as they are in the early days of DeepSeek’s text-based AI, then the Western AI industry may be in, as we say, deep doo-doo.
a picture is worth a thousand ai-generated words
Staggering its announcements of Janus-Pro days after the DeepSeek-V3 generative AI seems purposeful, designed to send the signal to the world that DeepSeek (and by extension, Chinese AI) is not a one-trick pony and can compete in whichever arena it chooses.
You can try a demo here for free, although you have to sign up for a free account to be able to send multiple inquiries without suffering through a waiting period. The interface isn’t as clean as DALL-E, but it’s not complicated, either. Only the purest of Luddites will be put off.
Under the banner marked “Multimodal Understanding,” you can upload images and ask Janus-Pro questions about them, such as analyzing a long-ass document for a brief summary. You can even upload a meme if you want to understand its context. You can leave the “Seed,” “top_p,” and “temperature” settings alone.
For simply giving Janus-Pro a prompt so that it’ll create an image for you, scroll down to the section titled “Text-to-Image Generation.” Give it your prompt, the same way you would for ChatGPT, and don’t bother messing with the “CFG Weight,” “temperature,” or “Seed” settings.
Unlike DeepSeek-V3, Janus-Pro doesn’t have apps on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, so you’ll have to access it through their website. But at least it’s free. The above image generated by Janus-Pro wasn’t any better at spelling than DALL-E, to be honest. Plus it was one of the five generated images where the finger didn’t look like a dick.
Just don’t ask it to draw you a picture of Tank Man in Tiananmen Square. So far, DeepSeek has proven that its most glaring handicap is self-inflicted at the direction of the Chinese government.
DeepSeek’s text-based AI simply won’t answer questions about any sensitive information that the Chinese government doesn’t want you to know about, so don’t expect a greater degree of truthfulness from Janus-Pro.
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