If you've been closely following the progress of Open AI, the company run by Sam Altman whose neural nets can now write original text and create original pictures with astonishing ease and speed, you might just skip this piece. If, on the other hand, you've only been vaguely paying attention to the company's progress and the increasing traction that other so-called "generative" AI companies are suddenly gaining and want to better understand why, you might benefit from this interview with James Currier, a five-time founder and now venture investor who cofounded the firm NFX five years ago with several of his serial founder friends. Currier falls into the camp of people following the progress closely -- so closely that NFX has made numerous related investments in "generative tech" as he describes it, and it's garnering more of the team's attention every month. In fact, Currier doesn't think the buzz about this new wrinkle on AI isn't hype so much as a realization that the broader startup world is suddenly facing a very big opportunity for the first time in a long time. "Every 14 years," says Currier, "we get one of these Cambrian explosions. We had one around the internet in '94.

The biggest change to the Internet since crypto just happened. A whole new world of applications opened up to Founders in the last 6 months. Generative Tech is the next step in software. It turns deep learning engines into collaborators to generate new content and ideas nearly like a human would. Some have called it "Generative AI," but AI is only half of the equation. AI models are the enabling base layers of the stack. The top layers will be thousands of applications. Generative Tech is about what will actually touch us – what you can do with AI as a partner. The Generative Tech sector is developing at such a pace that it has already been validated by real revenues and high valuations, even though we collectively didn't have a name for it until a month ago. Open AI, which powers GTP-3 and other AI models, is rumored to be raising capital at a valuation of many 10's of billions.