AI’s Compressed Industrial Revolution

The first modern factory arrived in the 18th century. The assembly line did not show up for another 144 years. What if AI squeezes that kind of leap into… two product cycles?

That’s Sequoia’s bet in a crisp talk by Konstantine Buhler. The pitch: we’re living through a cognitive revolution that echoes the Industrial Revolution, just sped up like a podcast on 3x. The steam engine maps to GPUs, the factory system maps to AI “factories” that turn data into tokens, and the assembly line maps to specialized AI applications that wire cognition into the workflows of every services job.

Here’s the argument, with a few reality checks and founder‑friendly frameworks you can use Monday morning.