Alex Schmitt’s core message was that 2026 will be the point at which AI’s capabilities have surpassed society’s and businesses’ ability to diffuse the technology effectively, creating the investment opportunity Lightspeed is targeting. The session opened by framing deep tech as an increasingly large share of venture investing: 36% of all venture money now goes into deep tech, four times the level of a few years earlier. The host also noted that the cost of a million tokens of GPT-3-level intelligence fell from $60 in 2021 to 6 cents in 2024, while 43% of all venture funding last year went to two AI labs. Against that backdrop, Schmitt positioned AI as Lightspeed’s third major technology cycle after internet and mobile, and argued it is the largest in the firm’s history because those earlier cycles created the guardrails that allow AI to work.