AI Is Not a New Internet. It Is a New Kind of Computer.

Ben Horowitz, who was at the browser maker Netscape when the dot-com bubble burst, says treating artificial intelligence as a rerun misses what it is.

The history of the industry, he argues, has always been computers and networks. Mainframes, PCs, and smartphones were computers. The internet was a network. AI, in this scheme, is very clearly the new computer.

The difference is in how it computes. The old machines were deterministic computers, which follow exact instructions to produce exact answers. AI is a probabilistic computer, which works out the most likely answer from patterns in data.

That distinction changes how fast a technology can grow. A network is only as useful as the number of people on it, so excitement can run far ahead of reality. At Netscape in 1996, Horowitz notes, the company had 90 percent browser share but only 55 million users, and half of those people connected over slow, dial-up lines.

Building an internet service then cost a lot of money for servers and storage, yet a new app might reach only about 30 million people. That is not really a business, he says. Then came the crash, before the internet eventually grew much larger.

AI does not have to wait for its network to be built. The wiring and the audience are already in place. Put up an AI product that works, and customers can reach it immediately. Because customers can reach a new product at once, "We've seen companies grow faster than any companies we've ever seen," Horowitz says.