We’ve all seen the craze around generative AI via e.g. ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion. GPT-4 is rumored to be even more mind-blowing. There are plenty of open questions about these models, their accuracy, and even their legality from an IP perspective. And from the startup and investor perspective, there are serious concerns about whether one can build a defensible business on top of any of these types of foundation model platforms. But hype cycles come and go. Many are not aware of this, but we’ve had several AI hype cycles followed by several AI winters. Did you know that the first chatbot launched was Eliza in 1964? It was an early natural language processing computer program created from 1964 to 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum.