Dave Rogenmoser, the chief executive of Jasper, said he didn't think many people would show up to his generative AI conference. It was all planned sort of last-minute, and the event was somehow scheduled for Valentine's Day. Surely people would rather be with their loved ones than in a conference hall along San Francisco's Embarcadero, even if the views of the bay just out the windows were jaw-slackening. But Jasper's "GenAI" event sold out. More than 1,200 people registered for the event, and by the time the lanyard crowd moseyed over from the coffee bar to the stage this past Tuesday, it was standing room only.

Artificial intelligence has once again become a hot buzzword in tech, even somewhat knocking off the malaise the venture capital markets have been under in the last several quarters. However, this time around it may have real staying power as advancements in generative AI seem to be riding a wave of excitement some have compared to what cloud computing saw nearly two decades ago. "About two years ago, we realized (AI) had crossed a threshold," said Dave Rogenmoser, co-founder and CEO of Austin, Texas-based AI content platform Jasper. "It started producing better end results." Grow your revenue with all-in-one prospecting solutions powered by the leader in private-company data.

Join us on November 9 to learn how to successfully innovate and achieve efficiency by upskilling and scaling citizen developers at the Low-Code/No-Code Summit. For Dave Rogenmoser, CEO of AI content platform Jasper -- which raised $125 million in funding a week ago -- the sheer level of hype and scale of chatter around generative AI last week was unexpected. Jasper's announcement came just one day after Stability AI, which developed its text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, announced its own massive $101 million raise. "I didn't know Stability was going to announce on Monday -- and then ours stacking on that definitely hyped up the whole market," he said. But Rogenmoser says that hype aside, generative AI -- which describes artificial intelligence using unsupervised learning algorithms to create new digital images, video, audio, text or code -- is no flash in the pan.