Martin was looking through his books and found a 1997 copy of Architects of the Web — Robert H. Reid’s firsthand account of the 1,000 days that built the commercial web. Reading it sparked a question: what’s actually different between the web explosion and the LLM explosion? The comparison everyone reaches for is obvious. The answer is less so.
The surprise at Mosaic and Netscape was: wait, this exists? Clicking a link and loading a page from a server on the other side of the world — that was a new phenomenon. The web opened a door nobody knew was there.
The surprise at ChatGPT was different: wait, it actually works this well? Large language models had been public since 2020. Developers were already building with them. But it took a free chat interface and a quality leap to make it undeniable to everyone else. The door wasn’t hidden. People just assumed it was still locked.
That’s a meaningful distinction. One surprise is discovery. The other is a threshold crossing.
The web gave people a new place. A location to inhabit, build on, and develop identities around. New industries emerged not because the web made old things cheaper, but because it made entirely new categories of activity possible — categories that didn’t exist before: search, social networks, e-commerce, online publishing. The web’s first users weren’t optimizing old workflows; they were inventing new ones.
AI, so far, is mostly giving people a new capability. It makes existing things faster — writing, coding, research, customer service. That’s real and economically significant, but it follows a different pattern. Capabilities get absorbed into existing structures. Places generate new ones.
This matters for what comes next.
The web’s early chaos — two grad students in a Stanford trailer building Yahoo, Rob Glaser streaming terrible-sounding baseball over a 14.4k modem — was possible because the infrastructure was cheap and the territory was unmapped. Anyone with an idea could stake a claim. The commercial opportunity was a surprise, not the point.
AI arrived pre-commercialized, into a landscape already mapped by expectation. The labs knew what they were building. The framing was never “I made a thing I wanted” — it was “we are building something that will transform everything.” The early web had three years of relative peace before Microsoft noticed. AI got three months.
The genuinely open question is agents.
If AI stops being a capability you invoke and starts being something that acts autonomously over time — that navigates the world on your behalf, builds things while you sleep, makes decisions in your name — the “new place” quality might finally emerge. An agent economy would be structurally different from the tool economy we’re in now. New categories of activity, not just faster old ones.
We’re not there yet. But that’s the threshold everyone is actually watching. Not whether the text generation is good enough. Whether the place shows up.
Sources: Architects of the Web — Robert H. Reid · Netscape · GPT-3
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