120k players in a week: Lessons from the first viral CLIP app: Joseph Nelson
Nov 22, 2023 · 15:59
Joseph Nelson (Roboflow CEO) details building paint.wtf, a viral AI Pictionary game using OpenAI CLIP that attracted 120,000 players in its first week, peaking at 7 submissions per second. The architecture uses GPT-3 to generate prompts, a browser canvas for drawing, and CLIP to judge similarity between text and image embeddings. Key lessons include CLIP's ability to read text, requiring a moderation hack that penalizes images more similar to handwriting than the prompt; CLIP's conservative similarity scores (ranging 8% to 48%); and the necessity of using CLIP itself to block NSFW content. Nelson also live-codes a minimal MVP in under 50 lines of Python using Roboflow's open-source inference server, demonstrating CLIP embedding and cosine similarity. The talk underscores foundation models' new paradigm of open-set understanding.
