Investors are going nuts for ChatGPT-ish artificial intelligence

Since ChatGPT’s launch in November, a mini-industry has defied the broader slump in tech. Not a week goes by without someone unveiling a “generative” artificial intelligence (AI) based on “foundation” models—the vast and complex algorithms that give ChatGPT and other AIs like it their wits. On February 24th Meta, Facebook’s parent company, released a model called LLaMA. Elon Musk, boss of Tesla and Twitter, reportedly wants to create an AI that would be less “woke” than ChatGPT. One catalogue, maintained by Ben Tossell, a British entrepreneur, has just grown to include, among others, Isaac Editor (which helps students write essays), Pickaxe (which analyses your own documents) and Ask Seneca (which answers questions based on the stoic philosopher’s writings). ChatGPT may be much talked about and, with over 100m users, talked to. Yet Mr Tossell’s database hints that the real action in generative AI is in all manner of less chatty services enabled by foundation models.

Each model is trained on reams of text, images, sound files or other data. This allows them to interpret instructions in natural language and respond with text, art or music. Though such systems have been around for some time, it took a consumer-facing service such as ChatGPT to capture the world’s—and investors’—imagination. As Mike Volpi of Index Ventures, a venture-capital (VC) firm, says, this happened just as his fellow tech backers, burned by the cryptocurrency crash and the empty metaverse, were on the lookout for the next big thing. In addition, even more than web browsers and smartphones, foundation models make it easy to build new services and applications on top of them. “You can open your laptop, get an account and start interacting with the model,” says Steve Loughlin of Accel, another VC firm.