Many of the current internet titans started by making things more efficient and accessible. Google for search, Facebook for connecting to people online, Microsoft for working with PCs at a reasonable price, Amazon for buying online as well as AWS. There are examples in other industries as well, Toyota is famous for it for example. There are probably counter examples but efficiency gains can be a huge deciding factor making companies successful.

You just listed a bunch of 0 to 1 companies, not 1 to 10 companies.

They weren’t quantitatively better than previous companies. They were qualitatively better.

I think finding significant efficiency gains with LLMs and the like may lead to qualitatively better products. Looking at people's experiences to DSV4F makes me believe that even more than before too.

I don't think people are realizing that speed can allow for categorically different user experiences that are more than just "worse than frontier capabilities but faster".

Is it really that much harder than making the magic juice that legacy cars run on? By now it is cheaper and less reliant on despots all over the world to get electricity than fuel in most of Europe I assume. Electricity is a great interface as well given the actual source of energy doesn't matter as much and is interchangeable.