AI Veteran Says This Hype Cycle Is Different — and She's Betting on It

At the 2026 HumanX Conference in San Francisco, 30-year AI veteran Songyee Yoon made a case that the current artificial intelligence wave is not another bubble but a genuine platform shift — one she's backing with venture capital dollars. In a wide-ranging interview, the founder and managing partner of Principal Venture Partners drew on decades of experience through AI winters and summers to explain why data, compute power, and talent have converged to make this moment fundamentally different.

• AI investor with 30 years in the field argues the current wave is "significantly different" from past hype cycles
• VC firm hunts for AI-native founders who solve real problems, not build tech demos
• Stanford instructor pushes back on job-loss fears, says AI will create new categories of work

Why it matters: Whether the current AI boom is a genuine transformation or another hype-and-bust cycle has enormous consequences for investors, workers, and institutions betting on the technology's staying power. Songyee Yoon says she's seen enough cycles to know the difference.