A pattern keeps repeating

You saw it.
You knew it.
You were too late.

Every major tech wave had visible signals months before mainstream adoption. The data was public. Nobody was watching.

Scroll to see what you missed
The Signal
A pseudonymous email to 400 cryptographers. Two replies. Zero press coverage.
From:Satoshi Nakamoto <satoshi@vistomail.com>
To:cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date:Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:10:00 -0700
Subject:Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.

The paper is available at:
http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
~400 subscribers · 2 replies · 0 press articles
This email started a $1.2 trillion asset class
bitcointalk.orgBitcoin › Marketplace
L
laszloSr. Member
May 18, 2010, 12:35:20 AM
I'll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.. like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day. I like having left over pizza to nibble on later. You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place.
👁 312 views↩ 18 replies
10,000 BTC = $1.1 billion today
$100 invested in 2009
$0
✕ You missed it
2009
Bitcoin
2006
Cloud
The Signal
Jeff Barr wrote 200 words about a new storage service. He had a plane to catch.
AWS News Blog
Amazon S3 — Simple Storage Service
by Jeff Barr · March 14, 2006 · ~200 words
Amazon S3 is storage for the internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. [...] I've got to catch a plane to Silicon Valley in a few minutes, or I'd write a lot more.
200 words. $600B industry.
YHacker News
Amazon EC2 – Virtual Server Hosting (aws.amazon.com)
8 points · toddh · Aug 24, 2006 · 11 comments
serverops_dan · 4h ago
Why would I rent a virtual server by the hour when I can just colo a box for $100/month? Seems like a solution looking for a problem.
11 comments. $90B/yr revenue now.
$100 invested in AMZN in 2006
$0
✕ You missed the wave
The Signal
500 apps on launch day. Press called them "novelty toys." 10 million downloads in 72 hours.
E
Engadget
@engadget
𝕏
LIVE from WWDC: Jobs announces App Store launching with 500 applications. "This is going to be a really big deal" he says. Most look like toys honestly. #WWDC2008 #iPhone
3:42 PM · Jul 10, 2008
💬 89🔁 234♡ 412📊 18.2K
"Toys." $935 billion economy today.
YHacker News
Apple: 10M App Store downloads in 72h (apple.com)
14 points · iphonedev · Jul 14, 2008 · 23 comments
webdev_skeptic · 2h ago
Nobody will pay for apps when the web is free. I give it 18 months before devs realize there's no money here.
Supercell sold for $8.6B eight years later.
$100 invested in AAPL in 2008
$0
✕ You missed the gold rush
2008
Mobile
2017
LLMs
The Signal
A paper on "attention." Eight authors at Google. Then an API that wrote code from plain English.
arXiv:1706.03762 [cs.CL]
Attention Is All You Need
Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit,
Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin
Google Brain · Google Research · University of Toronto — Submitted June 12, 2017
Abstract
We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train.
15 pages · Trained on 8 GPUs in 3.5 daysCitations: 140,000+
GitHub · Trending · June 2020
openai / gpt-3
GPT-3: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
★ 340◎ 89 forks"gpt" repos on GH: 12 total
@early_builder commented Jun 13, 2020
I gave it a plain English description and it wrote working React code in 10 seconds. API is $0.06/1K tokens. I'm building a startup around this tonight.
12 repos → 45,000 → 200,000
$100 invested in NVDA in 2020
$0
✕ You missed the biggest wave yet

The pattern is always the same.

01
Weak signals appear
Mailing lists. GitHub repos. Obscure papers. Visible to anyone. Noticed by almost no one.
02
Early adopters build
Stars spike. Threads multiply. Devs quit their jobs. The signal strengthens.
03
You read the headline
TechCrunch writes about it. VCs pile in. Window closes. You think: "I knew it."
Live — February 2026

The next signals
already exist.

Buried in 100,000+ documents per week across GitHub, arXiv, HN, Reddit, patents. The data is public. Nobody has time to read it all. We do.

Benchmark95
New arch beats transformers on 3 benchmarks — 40% less compute
arXivGitHubHN2h ago
Cost Curve87
GPU inference cost dropped 94% in 8 months — new provider undercuts market
HNReddit8h ago
Open Source91
Major lab open-sources reasoning model — Apache 2.0
GitHubarXiv5h ago
Cross-Domain68
"Stripe for AI agents" — 4 repos, 2 HN threads, 1 arXiv paper
GitHubHNarXiv1d ago

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"The price of one missed trade. One idea you had too late. One wave you watched from the shore."