Should you chase hype or ignore it? The tech industry has been debating this for decades. So at @Sequoia, we dug into 20 years of hype data. This summer, I worked with Sequoia intern @ochonaut to measure hype over the past 2 decades. The chart below ranks the most hyped topics on Hacker News for every year since 2007. Under each year sits the most valuable company founded that year. Here are a few observations: 1/ The top company founded in a given year is rarely related to the hype of that period. Airbnb was founded in 2008, when the top topic was Google. Uber arrived in 2009, while the conversation revolved around low-level programming. Anthropic came in 2021, while the internet was consumed by crypto. Chasing hype rarely leads to enduring outcomes. The top companies of recent years have yet to be decided. 2/ New trends announce themselves five to six years early. LLMs first cracked the top 15 in 2016 and took until 2022 to hit #1#. AI coding entered at #12# in 2021 and tops the list in 2026. Crypto entered in 2011 before 2017 and 2021 peaks. “New” trends don’t appear out of nowhere, and internet subcommunities are often the first to know where the puck is headed. 3/ Long-term “hype” is a durable signal. The “Musk-Verse” has been a top 15 topic for every one of the past 14 years. Sustained attention on the internet is rare and tends to mark something real. Next up, we want to run the same analysis with sources like X and LinkedIn. If that's of interest, give us some encouragement and we'll share the results.

AI is massively-"compressed," globally-sourced information. That information was sourced from all of us. And that information should be open to all of us. Excited for a more open future. Thank you for a great letter and leadership @JensenHuang !

Introducing ask-web: Rox’s in-house web search agent. ask-web sits on the cost-per-accuracy pareto frontier of the hyper-parameter grid when compared to frontier labs and commercial search agent providers. The agent delivers 91.3% accuracy at 1.03 cents per query on real production prompts. It has been running in production for more than 6 months with continuous evals. Inference partners: @togethercompute, @baseten, @modal Commercial Search vendors benchmarked: @perplexity_ai, @ExaAILabs, @p0. Frontier Search vendors benchmarked: @OpenAI, @AnthropicAI Exa, OpenAI and Anthropic excel on accuracy. Parallel and Perplexity are cost-efficient. Here’s the breakdown:

Fact: Tech saves lives and brings prosperity. Example: driving. Your commute is likely the most dangerous thing you did today. In the future, that won't be true. A century ago, driving in America cost 24 lives per 100 million miles. Engineers have fought that number down to about one. Autonomous vehicles are the next leap. They can be more than 10x safer than human drivers. It's also an example of tech working well with regulators. This is what technology does for humanity. The future is bright! Credit to @WSJ for this great chart and props to all the engineers working on Autonomous Vehicles.

Jensen Huang is a titan and a teacher. He recently sat down with me to explain his vision of the future of technology and humanity. He’s calm, clear, and very funny. We touched on many topics, ranging from the $20T or more AI economy in five layers to changes in labor for the AI age. Here are some of my main takeaways: 1) The world is moving from retrieval to generation 2) Generation offers intelligence customized to the individual 3) Nvidia is making the "generators" of intelligence 4) We've seen this kind of revolution at least three times before with energy (Generators), Telecommunications (vacuum tubes / transistors?), and now intelligence (GPUs) 5) There is a five-layer cake of participation in this many-many trillion dollar revolution: Energy, Chips, Infra, Models, and Applications. 6) There are many ways to participate in this revolution, and everyone has a role 7) We'll be pushed to dream up new problems to solve with this unprecedented intelligence 8) In this new future, it's not just having the answer, it's having the right questions 8) The right questions will drive us toward our individual and collective human purpose 9) We move from the carpenters to the architects I believe this is the realistic future. Thanks to Jensen and the entire @nvidia team for the conversation and for letting us share! 00:00 Introduction 00:42 From Chatbots to Generative AI 03:35 Agentic AI That Does Work 05:26 Downstream Industry Impact 06:25 Computing Shifts From Retrieval to Generation 11:26 A Planet Cocooned by Intelligence 14:27 Inside the NVIDIA AI Factory 20:48 AI Five Layer Cake 21:58 Beyond Chatbots to Biology 23:54 Tokens and World Models 24:53 Trillions in Applications 27:13 Ditch the AI Doom 31:32 Jobs Tasks vs Purpose 38:40 Closing the Tech Divide

Narrative violation and great insight from the latest Citadel Securities banger by Frank Flight: "We illustrated back in February that demand for software engineers, the most AI exposed occupation was accelerating higher, which we argued violates the displacement narrative. Indeed the acceleration in software job postings has continued, now up 18% from the inflection point in May last year."

Waymo vehicles have a 13x lower rate of serious accidents than human drivers. Six generations of hardware. Thousands of innovations in AI and software. 170M+ fully autonomous miles. For 20 years @Dmitri_Dolgov has been focused on making driving safer. While dozens of companies have come and gone, Dmitri persisted. He knows that getting to "good" is easy, getting to "great" is hard and getting to "super human safety" is extreme. Dmitri chooses extreme. My favorite part about him? He’s extremely humble about all this and remains focused on what's next: scaling. We're grateful to have hosted Dmitri and his @Waymo team at @sequoia AI Ascent last week. Full video here: 00:00 Introduction 01:25 Origins 02:45 DARPA Challenge 04:18 Google Self Driving 05:44 Startup Grind 07:11 The AV Hype Cycle 09:47 Waymo World Model 12:41 End-to-End 15:28 Gen 6 Hardware and Scaling 19:53 Safety Stories and the Future

Sir @demishassabis has a mind for synthesis. His favorite book is about a grand theory of everything. His preferred philosophers are seen by some as opposites. His life's work ranges from board games to Nobel-winning science. We're grateful to have hosted Demis and his @GoogleDeepMind team at @sequoia AI Ascent last week for a fireside chat. He kindly gave us permission to share this, and you can watch the full video here: 00:00 Intro 00:38 The Common Thread 01:29 Games as AI Training 02:59 Startup Advice 1.0 04:39 Founding DeepMind 07:25 DeepMind and AGI 08:52 AI for Science 10:37 Biology Breakthroughs and Isomorphic 12:42 New Sciences 20:29 Philosophy

Incredibly humbling that we got to host this group building parts of the future. Stay tuned for the videos, which feature @sonyatweetybird brilliant analysis and also her pro AI cartoon video prompting.

AI is mechanizing cognitive labor the way the industrial revolution mechanized physical labor. Today's @rox_ai Autopilot launch is evidence of that. The agent now autonomously builds pipeline, manages deals, and grows accounts across the entire sales cycle, freeing sellers to focus on what AI can't replace: the EQ work of closing deals and building relationships. Like with coding and support agents, this isn't about reducing work, it's about expanding output, increasing revenue, and growing GDP across every industry.

Our new safety data is in 📈 Over 170M miles through Dec 2025, the Waymo Driver was involved in 13x fewer serious injury or worse crashes than human drivers in those same cities. At our current scale, that means preventing a serious injury crash every 8 days—a real, positive impact on road safety. Learn more: