Forget Clippy. Microsoft's new killer app is ChatGPT.

That's the bullish view, and it's one that you'll hear a lot in Silicon Valley and Seattle these days. While Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants have been testing and honing AI models for years, a new crop of risk-taking upstarts has stolen their thunder by taking their experimental AI programs directly to the public. The release of tools like ChatGPT, DALLE-2, Stability AI's Stable Diffusion and Midjourney in the past year has made "generative AI" -- software that draws on vast data sets to create novel works -- the industry's buzziest byword.