I first heard about the Internet in 1985. It was an academic oddity created in 1969 that connected mainframe computers around the world.

By 1990, it was becoming a commercial endeavour. Computers were being connected to it at a growing pace. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web. In 1994, the Netscape browser showed the world a whole new way. Billions of dollars poured into stock markets and infrastructure builds. The Internet boom started in software.

Living in Austin at this time, the geek’s dream was to come up with an idea on how to use the Internet to make money and you’d become a millionaire overnight.

At this time, the biggest companies in the world were oil companies like Exxon and industrial like GE. The richest man in America, Sam Walton, had built a chain of stores selling low-cost goods in every big city and small town in America.

In a decade, companies that didn’t exist had pushed these companies into obscurity as every computer in the world was connected to this wired network called the Internet. The biggest companies were now Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. All internet companies.

The term Internet time was coined to describe how quickly things were happening. Those companies went from start up to market leaders in 2 decades.

Then Apple released the iPhone in 2007, and the size of the internet — already connecting hundreds of millions of computers — would grow by 30 times as it moved into every pocket, car, watch and doorbell. By 2018, Apple and Amazon were competing to be the first companies in history to be worth a trillion dollars. Apple got there first in August, and Amazon followed a month later.

Why am I giving you this business history lesson?

Because I lived through that time on the inside of the industry that drove it. I saw what it was like to be part of Internet startups. To see hundreds or thousands of geeks start companies in their garages and bedrooms. 99% of these failed, but a few became legends and made geeks multi-billionaires.

Let’s talk about what I’m seeing today.

Back in 1990, I was in the middle of it. Surrounded by geekdom in Austin. So I saw the internet go viral, as it were.

Being an old retired guy in Abilene in 2026, I’m not quite as connected as I used to be.

“Attention Is All You Need” was an academic paper released in 2017 that introduced the Transformer architecture — the foundation of modern AI. An academic oddity few knew about.

ChatGPT was the first Large Language Model chatbot to reach mass adoption, and was released in November 2022. Four years, kind of like HTTP to Netscape browser.

The top LLM makers, those considered on the frontier of the tech, are OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. OpenAI started the race in 2022. In 2023, Anthropic and Google joined in. Together they release 7 major new models that year.

Year	OpenAI	Anthropic	Google (Gemini)	Combined
2022	1	0	0	1
2023	3	3	1	7
2024	5	4	4	13
2025	~7	~5	~4	~16
2026 (Jan–Mar)	2–3	2	1	5–6

2026 annualised is projected at roughly 20-24 combined major releases — assuming the pace holds. That is roughly a 30% increase in releases per year.

And that’s just 3 American companies. China’s DeepSeek was in the news a year or so ago, but China alone has half a dozen major AI companies building their own models. Add in Meta, Mistral in France, and others, and there are easily a dozen companies racing to build the most powerful AI in the world.

We’re in AI time now.

As an interesting side story of how fast things are moving, in November of 2023, OpenAI’s founder and CEO was ousted by his board on Friday Nov 17th, offered a job leading AI at Microsoft the next day, the whole workforce signed a letter saying they’d leave and join him on Sunday, and the board was removed and he was reinstated by Wednesday.

That’s drama in AI Time.

Anthropic’s CEO said just a few weeks ago — right after they had released two major new models in 2 weeks — that for the last 3 years their revenue had 10Xed per year, growing from roughly $100 million to $1 billion to $10 billion.

In 2020, the biggest companies in the world were Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphapet (Google), and Facebook (Meta). In 2026 the largest company in the world, which wasn’t even in the top 10 in 2020, is NVIDIA. It’s market cap went from #323 Billion in 2020, to $4.4 Trillion in 2026, providing the chips to build AI.

That’s company growth in AI Time.

And we see it here in Abilene. The $500 billion dollar Stargate data center broke ground in June 2024, and by October the next year 200,000 computers were up and running in two 500,000 sq ft buildings, consuming as much power as all the homes in Abilene. And that’s just phase one. Oh, and those 200K computers? NVIDIA GPUs, each roughly 2,500 times more powerful than a tricked-out gaming PC — never mind your five-year-old word processor.

That’s construction and infrastructure in AI Time.

If the Internet boom started around 1990, it took 30 years for an internet company to be in the top 5 market caps. And there were three in 2020, Amazon, Alphabet, and Facebook. The first AI company to make the top 5 sits at the top six years later.

Unlike the Internet, this tech is making creating more of itself faster.

Those geeks looking for the killer AI app that will make them billionaires? They are doing it with AI tools like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex.

In my lifetime, I’ve lived through at least 3 major tech revolutions. The PC revolution as a child. The Internet Revolution as a young man. The Smart Phone revolution in my middle years.

And now we are in what will probably be the biggest yet, and it will likely take less than a decade.

Top 5 Companies by Market Cap — A Half Century of Change

Rank	1980	1990	2000	2010	2020	2026
1	IBM	Exxon	Microsoft	ExxonMobil	Apple	NVIDIA
2	AT&T	GE	GE	Microsoft	Microsoft	Apple
3	Exxon	IBM	NTT Docomo	Apple	Amazon	Alphabet
4	Standard Oil	AT&T	Cisco	Walmart	Alphabet	Microsoft
5	Schlumberger	Philip Morris	Walmart	Berkshire Hathaway	Facebook	Amazon
Theme	Oil	Oil & Industrial	Dot-com boom	Oil comeback	Big Tech	AI era