ChatGPT and its fellow chatbots may be much talked about (and talked to: ChatGPT may now have more than 100m users). But Mr Tossell's newsletter hints that the real action in generative AI is increasingly in all manner of less chatty services enabled by foundation models. Each model is trained on reams of text, images, sound files or any other heap of data. This allows them to interpret, react to and create statements in natural language, as well as art, music and any other type of content you find on the internet. Even as the venture-capital (VC) industry nurses a giant hangover after the recent tech crash put paid to a bubbly couple of years, entrepreneurs experimenting with generative AI have no trouble attracting investments.

Since ChatGPT was launched in November, a new mini-industry has mushroomed that has defied the broader slump in tech. Not a week goes by without someone unveiling a "generative" artificial intelligence (AI) underpinned by "foundation" models--the large and complex algorithms that give ChatGPT and other AIs like it their intelligence. On February 24th Meta, Facebook's parent company, released a model called LLaMA. This week it was reported that Elon Musk, the billionaire boss of Tesla and Twitter, wants to create an AI that would be less "woke" than ChatGPT. One catalogue, maintained by Ben Tossell, a British tech entrepreneur, and shared in a newsletter, has recently grown to include, among others, Ask Seneca (which answers questions based on the writings of the stoic philosopher), Pickaxe (which analyses your own documents), and Issac Editor (which helps students write academic papers).