Farewell crypto, hello generative AI. With the selective amnesia that is one of the defining characteristics of their trade, venture capital investors have already moved on from their unfortunate dalliance with the imploding FTX crypto exchange and fallen in love with the next big thing. This year, they say, will be the breakout year for artificial intelligence. Although that statement might have been made in any of the past few years, this time they really mean it.There are some good reasons to believe this assertion may be true. The launch in November of OpenAI’s ChatGPT language-generation model, with its astonishing ability to generate paragraphs of convincing text at remarkable speed, has opened users’ eyes to the power of generative AI. Large language models, such as ChatGPT, have been trained on vast amounts of data ingested from the internet and are almost instantaneously able to recognise and replicate patterns of text, images, computer code, audio and video. No one is quite sure yet what exactly their killer application will be. But more than 160 start-ups have already been launched to explore the answer.