How does the current AI wave compare in magnitude to previous platform shifts such as the internet and mobile?

Sanjit Biswas · Dec 8, 2023 · hedged

AI feels bigger than the internet wave or the mobile/wireless wave he lived through

He has worked through the internet and mobile disruptions and this one feels of larger scale

Scope: framed as a personal feeling, 'looking pretty big'

45:55 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara

Mamoon Hamid · Oct 21, 2024

We are in an AI supercycle that feels roughly ten times bigger than the rise of the Internet in the late 1990s

He was in Silicon Valley in 1997 during the Internet boom and this moment feels like that experience multiplied

4:38 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws

Martin Casado · Jul 28, 2025

This is the most exciting time in the technology industry since the late nineties — a genuine super cycle

48:04 20VC: a16z's Martin Casado on Anthropic vs OpenAI: Where Value Accrues | Cursor vs Replit vs Lovable: Who Wins and Who Loses | The One Sin in AI Investing | Why Open Source is a National Security Risk with China

David Cahn · Oct 27, 2025

AI is the most important story of our lifetime and a once-in-human-history event that will completely transform the world

Scope: stated despite all the risks and complexity discussed earlier

70:10 20VC: Sequoia's David Cahn on The Winners and Losers in AI | The $0-$100M Revenue Club: Is Triple, Triple, Double, Double Dead? | The Future of Defence: Who Wins and Who Loses | How to Analyse Margins and Growth Rates in a World of AI

Oren Zeev · Feb 2, 2026

AI is possibly the most powerful transition or force in history, and both the excitement and the worry about it will be proven right

Any force that powerful gives good reasons for both excitement and concern

Scope: both-sided: excitement and worry each validated

56:43 20VC: 50% of Funds Will Go Out of Business | Why Growth Expectations Today are BS and Will Not Last | Why Oren Zeev Takes $0 Management Fees But 30% Carry | Why GPs Should Not Tell LPs Their Strategy

Eran Zinman · Mar 2, 2026

AI is the biggest technological change since the invention of computers

Scope: says the excitement holds if you set aside the negativity attached to AI

65:07 20VC: Monday.com CEO on Is SaaS Dead: Will Everything Be Vibe Coded | Will Systems of Record Become Valueless Databases in an Agentic World | Will LLMs Own the Value in the Application Layer with Eran Zinman

Mitchell Green · Mar 7, 2026

AI will be even bigger than previously thought and will change many more areas than people are currently imagining

54:57 20VC: Why the SaaS Apocalypse is BS | Why China Will Win the AI War | Why 50% of VCs Should Not Exist and are Tourists | Why Stock-Based Comp is the Hidden Sin of the Valley with Mitchell Green, Lead Edge Capital

Noah Desai Weiss · Jun 16, 2023

Building in generative AI today resembles the early mobile era around 2008–2009: the underlying platforms shift every three months, so keeping a close pulse on the technology is the core discipline

Fundamental technology and platform changes are what enable new product types, and they're changing on a quarterly cadence

46:09 20Product: Slack CPO Noah Weiss on How to Master Product-Led-Growth, The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Scaling Into Enterprise & What Needs to Change with your Product, Team and Processes when Scaling From PLG to Enterprise

Scott Farquhar · Oct 9, 2023

AI is a genuine platform shift that will reshape the competitive landscape, and the list of top technology companies in five years may look very different from today's

Every prior technological change saw some companies survive, some rise from the ashes, and some fail to make the transition

Scope: acknowledges AI is also 'the next greatest buzzword'

22:24 20VC: Atlassian Co-Founder Scott Farquhar on The Biggest Lessons Scaling Atlassian to $50BN Market Cap; The Four Roles of the CEO, The Funding Round That Net Accel $6BN, The Regrets of Omission and Commission & The Honeymoon Cut Short

Gustav Söderström · Dec 20, 2023

The AI shift is at its beginning, not its end, and is a genuine platform discontinuity comparable to the shift to mobile rather than a continuation of iteration

The mobile shift forced Spotify's business model to change and could have disrupted the company; the last seven or eight years were an iteration track and now it's unclear what will happen

48:16 20VC Roundtable: Spotify, Adobe & Linkedin CPOs on How AI Changes The Future of Product, Why AI is Now the Product, How TikTok Changed Product, Why Cost is the Biggest Barrier to LLM Usage & Why Incumbents Can Adopt AI Faster Than Any Prior Innovation Cyc

Eiso Kant · Oct 7, 2024

The current moment in AI will be looked back on in ten years as the table-setting moment, comparable to the birth of mobile and the internet

It's a race, and the positions taken now determine who is in it; a $500M round is what buys entry

Scope: framed as a race with both a capabilities and a go-to-market dimension

0:00 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside

Tom Blomfield · May 13, 2024

The AI hype is justified — it is a technological revolution as big as the internet that will transform every industry

Each era has a dominant wave — the internet 1995–2001, smartphones 2010–2020 which Monzo rode; AI is the current one, with small impacts over the next year or two and very large ones over ten to thirty years

Scope: small effects near-term, very large effects over 10–30 years

39:08 20VC: Behind the Scenes at Y Combinator: The Interview Process | What the Best & Worst Do in the Program | Do the Best All Raise Pre-Demo Day & YC's Fundraising Advice to Startups | Why the Value is in Application Layer AI with Tom Blomfield

Nick Frosst · Sep 1, 2025

AI will drive drastic changes to the nature of the workforce, comparable to the personal computer, the internet, the printing press and the industrial revolution

Every prior general-purpose technology produced drastic workforce change, and that pattern will continue

Scope: framed as change to the nature of work rather than pure headcount reduction

27:23 20VC: Cohere Founder on How Cohere Compete with OpenAI and Anthropic $BNs | Why Counties Should Fund Their Own Models & the Need for Model Sovereignty | How Sam Altman Has Done a Disservice to AI with Nick Frosst

Nick Frosst · Sep 1, 2025

AI is a fundamentally transformative technology on the order of the personal computer, the industrial revolution, the steam engine and the printing press, but much of the public conversation about it is illegitimate and misdirects attention from the real issues

There are plenty of legitimate things to discuss about a big technology, yet a great deal of what people spend their time on is not legitimate

Scope: acknowledges real changes are happening

58:09 20VC: Cohere Founder on How Cohere Compete with OpenAI and Anthropic $BNs | Why Counties Should Fund Their Own Models & the Need for Model Sovereignty | How Sam Altman Has Done a Disservice to AI with Nick Frosst

Christian Kleinerman · Sep 22, 2023

AI is a platform shift on the scale of the internet and of mobile — not larger, but comparable

It is one of those shifts where anything and everything gets better

8:48 20VC: Are Foundation Models Becoming Commoditised? Do OpenAI and Anthropic of the World Have a Sustaining Moat? Why Smaller Models May Work Better? Why Incumbents with Data Power Win the AI War with Christian Kleinerman, SVP Product @ Snowflake

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024 · hedged

The current AI moment is among the most exciting technological periods of his career, comparable to dot-com 1.0 and the 2009 mobile-app wave, but not clearly above them

Dot-com 1.0 saw people first build these businesses with Netscape IPO-ing, and 2009 mobile produced Airbnb, Uber and Stripe

Scope: ranks it 'right up there' rather than first

49:42 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Howie Liu · Aug 25, 2023

AI, and especially LLMs, will be a different but potentially more profound shift than cloud computing.

Cloud's benefits are narrow and legible — no servers, scalability, falling hardware costs — whereas Gen AI can automate or accelerate a very broad range of knowledge work across legal, finance, marketing and more, so the total disruption is much bigger.

Scope: conditional on being early in both adoption and technological improvement curves; AI still in its infancy

6:51 20Product: Enterprises are not Adopting AI Yet, When Will AI Break Into Enterprise, What are the Blockers, What Do Enterprises Need from AI & Why Services Companies Will Win in the Next 10 Years of AI Implementation with Howie Liu, Founder & CEO @ Airtabl

Amit Bendov · Sep 12, 2025

AI is a bigger platform shift than cloud because cloud only reorganised IT spend while AI taps payroll

Cloud was an IT revolution — the end user barely notices the difference between Salesforce and its predecessor, the beneficiary was IT, which is only ~6% of company budget; payroll is the biggest line item and AI eliminates the ~70% of time spent on admin work

Scope: Value must be reflected in pricing for this to show up commercially

21:01 20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong

Noam Shazeer · Aug 31, 2023

The best applications of AI haven't been invented yet — we are at the invention-of-electricity or invention-of-the-computer stage

We don't yet know what the coolest things built on this technology will be

22:10 20VC: Spending $2M to Train a Single AI Model: What Matters More; Model Size or Data Size | Hallucinations: Feature or Bug | Will Everyone Have an AI Friend in the Future & Raising $150M from a16z with Noam Shazeer, Co-Founder & CEO @ Character.ai

Noam Shazeer · Aug 31, 2023

AI is at a 'Wright Brothers first airplane' moment — today's most impressive applications are nothing compared to what is coming

There is enormous momentum both in building better hardware and in research, so the technology will keep getting much smarter

27:38 20VC: Spending $2M to Train a Single AI Model: What Matters More; Model Size or Data Size | Hallucinations: Feature or Bug | Will Everyone Have an AI Friend in the Future & Raising $150M from a16z with Noam Shazeer, Co-Founder & CEO @ Character.ai

Mike Cannon-Brookes · Oct 13, 2025

Every prior technology disruption was also claimed at the time to be about to solve every problem in the world, so the current AI-solves-everything narrative is nothing new

There has never been a technology generation that wasn't going to solve every problem

36:24 Past hype cycles made identical solve everything claims so current narrative is not new

Harry Stebbings · Oct 21, 2024

The level of incumbent spending on frontier models makes this cycle fundamentally different from the dot-com era

In the 1990s there were no incumbents spending $100B on frontier models; entering the frontier model race now reportedly costs $100B

5:07 Incumbent capex scale makes this cycle structurally different from dot com

David Cahn · Aug 5, 2024

A new industrial revolution is just getting started, and within twelve months data will show more factories being built than ever before

He is seeing tremendous industrial buildout firsthand, e.g. a long-duration battery company that built a billion-dollar factory in twelve months

35:13 Physical industrial buildout signals a genuine new industrial revolution

Aaron Levie · May 22, 2024

The rate of AI model improvement is unprecedented in technology history — nothing has ever grown at 500x every eighteen months

Context windows went from roughly 4,000 tokens with GPT-3.5 eighteen months ago to Google's announced 2 million token Gemini, about a 500x improvement

9:42 Model context window growth of 500x in eighteen months is unprecedented

George Sivulka · Jan 22, 2025

The introduction of inference/AI will create on the order of $100 trillion of value over the next sixty years, comparable to what the introduction of the computer created

The unit of compute created roughly $100 trillion of stock market value over sixty years, and the opportunity from the new unit — inference — is the exact same size, spanning verticals, platforms, cooperatives and 'agent employees'

28:08 Inference will create roughly 100 trillion of value matching the computer eras scale

Cristóbal Valenzuela · Aug 28, 2023

We do not yet realize how transformative AI will be — whatever we currently think about it is wrong, and much of what people are engineering now may not matter in a few years

It's very hard for people to understand a change of that magnitude, so today's framing may not even make sense in a couple of years

34:40 Current understanding of ais transformative scale is likely wrong and will look different later

Demis Hassabis · Apr 7, 2026

The arrival of AGI will be equivalent to ten times the industrial revolution happening at ten times the speed

0:00 Ten times the industrial revolution at ten times the speed

Eiso Kant · Oct 7, 2024 · hedged

The Netscape analogy misleads about AI because we are on a technological exponential and, unlike 1996, a large pool of people and capital already understands what the next ten years look like

History rhymes rather than repeats; in 1996 there wasn't this amount of people and capital who understood the future, so it took time to get there

53:22 Netscape 1996 analogy misleads because todays capital and people already understand the trajectory