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Good day. There’s no shortage of sports metaphors in investing, but venture capitalists have been leaning hard on one baseball phrase to describe artificial intelligence: early innings.
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“Where are we in the AI adoption journey? Short answer—we’re not even in the first innings yet.”—Khosla Ventures Partner Ethan Choi, X post in January
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“So, when people say we’re in the early innings of AI, what they’re really saying is that we’re in inning 1 of usefulness.”—Andreessen Horowitz General Partner David George and Partner Santiago Rodriguez, newsletter in September
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“We're just at maybe the second pitch of the first inning of this very long ballgame.” —Y Combinator President and CEO Garry Tan, podcast last April
Disclosure: I’m a baseball fan. So I wanted to test whether this phrase was in fact becoming more common or whether I just notice it more since I’d usually rather be at the ballpark.
I turned to AI startup Nectar Social, which helps brands track and respond to chatter about their products across social media. Using a list of U.S.-based venture firms from CB Insights, Nectar tracked social-media comments by venture capitalists and some people close to the startup investing world. It found that “early innings” (and similar baseball-inning phrasing) used in the context of AI skyrocketed starting later in 2025. Mentions were up more than 1,500% in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2025.
I also asked Nectar to look at mentions of “AI bubble,” wondering if perhaps “early innings” was a linguistic salve to investors edgy about roaring AI startup valuations. Using a similar methodology, Nectar found social-media mentions of “AI bubble” surged in the second half of last year. The two terms have diverged this year, as “bubble” mentions cooled off but “early innings” marched on.
“Venture, like the broader internet, runs on zeitgeist phrases,” said Jason Saltzman, head of insights at CB Insights. “‘SaaS is dead,’ ‘software is eating the world,’ ‘mobile first,’ ‘Web3’—these phrases spike because they’re cognitively efficient.” The phrases compress a complicated market view into something easy to convey, especially on social media, he said.
“Early innings” might just be the current shorthand for “this is bigger than the current hype cycle,” Saltzman said.
For a venture capitalist, the plaintive message tucked in “early innings” is obvious.
“There is a financial and psychological incentive, I think, for VCs to say that about [AI]—but really almost about anything,” said Bradley Tusk, founder and chief executive of Tusk Ventures.
“If you are not seeing immediate real gains either on paper or ideally through exits, you don’t want your investors panicked,” he said. “You don’t want them feeling like you’re failing or that they made a bad investment, and so you want to preach patience.”
Martin Casado, a general partner and leader of the infrastructure practice at Andreessen Horowitz, said the phrase is apt for AI. “What people are saying is this is probably going to be a 20-year, 30-year supercycle like the internet or like the microchip,” he said.
The next phase of the cycle, Casado said, would feature a slowdown in aggregate company growth and new uses being tackled. Still, the early phase of a supercycle can stretch for some time, he said, as the internet’s advance has.
AI’s possibility has a long road to run, said Casado. “You could argue we’re still in the early innings of the internet.”
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