Sequoia Capital says
your skills are turning into aluminum
In late April 2026
Sequoia the king of global venture capital held a closed door summit in San Francisco
open only to top AI founders and investors
OpenAI president Greg Brockman was there
AI legend Andrej Karpathy was there too
but the biggest bombshell did not come from them
it came from the opening talk by three Sequoia partners
Here they are first the investor behind Snowflake
Zoom and Notion Pat Grady
then the author of what AI investors worldwide treat as a mental map
the Sequoia generative AI series Sonya Huang
and Konstantine Buhler who backed XBOW Xaira
Waymo and other frontier AI companies
Hello
hi everyone
I am Leo Wang
Today I want to talk about the one story in that Sequoia talk that chilled me the most
not the technical details
but a story about aluminum
This true piece of history from a hundred and forty years ago
is frighteningly precise
it predicts what happens to every one of us in the AI age
Before I tell that story
we need to be clear on one thing
what exactly did Sequoia announce in this talk
In one line AGI is here
You heard that right
this is not clickbait from some influencer
and it is not an AI company hyping itself
this is the firm behind Apple Google Nvidia
and Airbnb the top venture firm in the world Sequoia Capital
putting that statement on the table officially
That is bombshell number one
Pat Grady said on stage
the AI apps of the past few years were like faster horses
ten to forty percent more efficient
nice
but you are still riding a horse
Now it is different
the car has arrived
the new generation of AI apps makes you ten to forty times more productive
what changes is not the speed
it is the nature of the work itself
Then he shifted
and said something that made the whole room hold its breath
let us be bold here we believe
this is AGI
Note this
Sequoia is not using the academic definition
Pat put it plainly I studied economics
we are investors
we are not here to write a technical definition of AGI
what we look at is this
can you send an AI off to finish a complex task
when it hits a wall can it figure something out
when it fails can it recover on its own
can it keep going until the job is done
If it can
then to me that is AGI
The scary part of that definition is
it already happened
Claude Code today
OpenAI Codex
and all the agent frameworks out there
you really can send them off to do something complex
then go grab a coffee
and come back to finished work
This is not science fiction
this is what I use every day
On my own YouTube channel
from the script and the images to the voice and the edit
almost all of it is done by AI
Six months ago I still had to watch every step by hand
now I just point a direction
and the agents run the whole thing themselves
This change is not gradual
it is a cliff edge
AGI is here
So what now
Sequoia founder Don Valentine had a famous line
So what
what does all of this actually mean
Pat's answer is driving a car is nothing like riding a horse
you cannot drive a car the way you ride a horse
and you certainly cannot build cars the way you raise horses
if you are still working with horse logic today
you are already on the wrong track
So where is the right one
that brings us to bombshell number two
Pat Grady then dropped a set of numbers that made people gasp
for the past thirty years
all of Silicon Valley the whole golden age of SaaS
every founder was fighting over a six hundred fifty billion dollar software market
that is already huge
right
But he said
the real gold mine in the AI age is the ten trillion dollar services market
Ten trillion
fifteen times the software market
Why could earlier tech revolutions never touch it
because services need judgment reasoning and long term follow through
only humans could do that before
but now agents can
Lawyers reviewing contracts accountants checking books
doctors reading scans analysts writing reports
this is no longer AI standing beside you making you faster
this is AI doing the job itself
Then he made a comparison that took the air out of the room
legal services in the United States alone
is a four hundred billion dollar industry
one country one vertical
is worth more than half the entire old software market
So Sequoia's core call is that services are the new software
the past sold tools
the future sells outcomes
if you are still building a product that makes people thirty percent faster
you are competing on the wrong dimension
the real race
is AI replacing the service itself
Follow the logic here you used to hire a lawyer
at five hundred dollars an hour
four hundred of that pays for the law stored in his head
but if AI can pull up the same knowledge in three seconds
and more of it and more accurately
why would you still pay by the hour
You are no longer paying for knowledge
you are paying for trust
and trust
once AI is more accurate than humans
gets repriced too
Bombshell number three hits even harder
Sonya Huang put it beautifully everything you can imagine
that would take a hundred years to build
can now be done in a hundred days
A century of progress compressed into a hundred days
it sounds like a motivational poster
but then she listed three real cases
The first is Nathan Sobo founder of the code editor Zed
over a single vacation
by himself
he used AI coding tools to finish a project planned for three years
Three years of work
one person
one vacation
this is not thirty percent faster
this is time itself compressed a hundred times
The second is Bret Taylor founder of Sierra
the former co CEO of Salesforce
he rebuilt his company's entire core system over one weekend
just one weekend
The third is Notion
they used AI to rewrite their whole product codebase in six weeks
eight million lines of it
Before AI
a strong engineer wrote fifty to a hundred thousand lines a year
what Notion did in six weeks
equals three to five years of work for a large team
Now stack all these compressed timelines together
and it gets genuinely frightening
if one project is compressed a hundred times
and a team runs ten of them at once
and each one calls a hundred agents
that is not a hundred times faster
it is a hundred thousand times
Now you can feel it
why Sequoia says the car has arrived
But the part of the talk that really sank in me
was the story Konstantine Buhler told
The year is 1884
America had just finished the Washington Monument
the tallest building in the world at the time
to show the highest respect
they decided to cap it with the most precious metal on earth
a hundred ounces of it
The piece was so precious
that before installation it went to Tiffany in Manhattan
and sat in the window on public display for a while
people lined up to see it
some even stepped over it
so they could brag I stepped over the tip of the Washington Monument
By now you are probably guessing gold
platinum
diamond
the answer is aluminum
Yes
the same aluminum you wrap leftovers in
wrap sandwiches with and drink soda from
Back in 1884
aluminum cost about as much as silver
it is one of the most abundant metals in the crust of the earth
but nobody could extract it from ore efficiently
so it stood shoulder to shoulder with silver
precious enough to display in a Tiffany window
And then
in 1886
two years after the monument was finished
a twenty two year old named Charles Martin Hall invented electrolysis
in his lab he dissolved alumina in molten cryolite and ran current through it
two hours later
aluminum separated out of the ore
That invention rewrote the fate of aluminum
within a few decades
aluminum went from a treasure in Tiffany's window to candy wrapper material
crumpled up and thrown in the trash
After telling that story Konstantine
said something that ran a chill down my spine
aluminum
is intelligence
electrolysis
is AI
We are entering a world where skills that took ten
or twenty years to reach a PhD level
can be summoned in an instant
and crumpled up and tossed when you are done
Think about what that means
if you are a lawyer
seven years of studying law
if you are a doctor
ten years of studying medicine
if you are a financial analyst
fifteen years in the industry you think that is your moat
you think nobody can take it
but aluminum thought so too
Aluminum was once as expensive as silver
it stood on top of the Washington Monument
then a twenty two year old spent two hours
and rewrote its fate completely
This is not fear mongering
this is a pattern history keeps confirming
when technology fully solves a scarcity
that scarcity stops being worth anything
Oil lamps gave way to electric light
carriages gave way to cars
long distance calls gave way to the internet
every time people said this time is different
my skill cannot be replaced
and every time
technology did not care what people thought
Only this time
the scarcity being solved is not a material or an energy source
it is the intelligence we are so proud of
Stop for a second and ask in the work you do now
how much of it is selling an information gap in your head
how much is charging because you read a few more books
or handled a few more cases than the next person
if AI closes those gaps within three years
what is left of you
Konstantine shared another detail
in 2006 NASA needed an antenna for a satellite
traditional antennas are drawn by engineers
geometrically symmetric with elegant lines
a perfect marriage of human taste and physics
but that time NASA said
let the computer design it
They used an evolutionary algorithm
letting the program try fail optimize and evolve
the antenna it produced was bent and crooked
with no symmetry at all
it looked like a piece of wire someone had crumpled
no engineer would ever draw that
but it performed far better than the human designed ones
In March 2006
that evolved antenna flew to space on the satellite
becoming the first hardware evolved by a computer
ever to actually fly in space
Konstantine said when we hand cognition to machines
what comes back may defy human intuition entirely
AI does not think the way we do
it has an alien design language
That line stayed with me for a long time
we instinctively judge AI output by human taste is it pretty
does it read like a human wrote it
does it match our experience
but that evolved antenna tells us
the optimal answer may live outside the human map entirely
that bent crooked wire
simply outperformed the antenna the best human engineers could design
There is something deeper here
why does human design chase symmetry
because the brain likes symmetry
symmetry feels safe stable and predictable
but the universe does not care what your brain likes
the optimum is computed by the laws of physics
not voted on by human taste
When you offload cognition from the brain to algorithms
what comes back may make no sense to you
and it is still better
If you are starting to feel anxious
hold on
Konstantine closed with something that quieted the whole room
he said
tens of thousands of years of art history were a chase after realism
from cave paintings to Egyptian murals
from Greek pottery to Renaissance oil painting
we spent tens of thousands of years making pictures look more real
Then in 1839 photography arrived
a machine did in one second
what generations of painters spent lifetimes learning
everyone said painting was finished art was dead
the machine renders better than any human
Sound familiar
it is exactly the AI conversation we are having today
But what actually happened
humans did not abandon art
they redefined it
painters asked themselves is art about capturing what the eye sees
or capturing what the heart and soul see
So impressionism came
expressionism came
cubism came
these new art forms were humanity's greatest answer to that revolution
Photography did not kill art
it only killed realism
the territory of art was blown wide open instead
Konstantine ended by quoting a line from twenty five hundred years ago
from the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras
man is the measure of all things
Nothing has value to us in a vacuum
not aluminum
not art
and not intelligence
they have value
because of how people experience them
Then he said what I think was the most powerful line of the whole talk
AI can do the work
AI will do the work
but only human connection gives you a reason to care
Work will look completely different in ten years
everything will change violently
but one thing will not
the relationship you build today with the person next to you will last
that is what you will find truly valuable when you look back
I have been an angel investor for over a decade
I have watched wave after wave of technology wash over society
every time a wave arrives
most people react with fear afraid of being left behind
afraid their skills lose value
afraid there is no place for them in the new world
That fear is real and reasonable
but fear has never been a good guide to action
The biggest takeaway for me from this Sequoia talk
is not how big a ten trillion dollar market is
nor how fast a century compresses into a hundred days
it is the deepest lesson hidden in the aluminum story
Aluminum went from treasure to trash
not because aluminum changed
it is the same aluminum
same chemical formula
same physical properties
same uses
what changed was the cost of getting it
When that cost falls from astronomical to almost nothing
the scarcity disappears
value is not in the thing itself
it is in the scarcity
So in the AI age
what is actually scarce
Knowledge is not scarce
AI remembers more and looks it up faster
reasoning is not scarce
AI calculates more precisely and thinks more completely
even judgment is being eaten away by AI
because AI has seen more cases than any expert sees in a lifetime
So what can AI not do
what will never turn into aluminum
I think Konstantine already gave the answer
it is why you do this at all
it is what you care about
it is who you are with
it is the pain the joy the confusion and the insight you have lived
AI can generate ten thousand love poems
but it has never loved
AI can analyze ten thousand business models
but it never loses sleep over a product
AI can simulate the language of empathy
but it has never lost anyone
Your scarcity is not how much knowledge you carry
it is that you are someone who has lived
I once read an analogy fearing AI will replace human connection
is like fearing calculators will replace mathematicians
calculators replaced arithmetic
not mathematics
That line is exactly right
AI replaces the mechanical part of cognition
the parts that can be encoded compressed and copied at scale
but the understanding between two people
the moment something clicks late at night
the thing that floods your chest the first time you become a parent
these are not data
they are existence itself
I often say
all knowledge is a raft
science is a raft
Buddhism is a raft
philosophy is a raft
AI is a raft too
A raft is for crossing the river
not for collecting
wise people do not cling to the raft
they look at the far shore
Sequoia says the car has arrived
fine
the car has arrived
do you keep clutching your saddle
or do you learn to drive
or do you answer the deeper question where are you actually going
What do you think in the AI age
what skill will never turn into aluminum
I am curious about your answer
I am Leo Wang
see you next time