Training Data
Join us as we train our neural nets on the theme of the century: AI. Sonya Huang, Pat Grady and more Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to ask critical questions and develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies—and their implications for technology, business and society.
Episodes
David Silver and Lasse Espeholt of Ineffable Intelligence: A Superlearner for the Age of Experience
David Silver spent two years building AlphaGo on human data. When he removed human data altogether building AlphaGo Zero, the AI surpassed AlphaGo in under two days. He left DeepMind to run that same bet in pursuit of superintelligence. David and Lasse Espeholt, co-founders of Ineffable Intelligence, explain their plan to build a “superlearner”—an agent that starts knowing nothing and discovers sc
Google's AI Infrastructure Chief, Amin Vahdat, on the Physics & Economics of Frontier AI
At 100,000-accelerator scale, something fails multiple times an hour, which is why Google's Chief Technologist for AI Infrastructure Amin Vahdat thinks FLOPS is a vanity metric. The metric that matters is what he calls goodput: the useful work a workload actually delivers through real failures. Amin walks through the calculus that split the TPU line into 8i and 8t for the first time, why the TPU's
Box's Aaron Levie: On Reinventing Yourself in the AI Age and Enterprise Diffusion
Starting a company is hard. Reinventing your company for AI as a public company with quarterly earnings results is even harder. Aaron Levie has pulled off the transition with Box and offers hard-won advice for founders. The cofounder and CEO of Box argues the value isn't only in the model; it's in the bridge from a model's raw capability to the actual workflow inside a bank, a law firm, or a pharm
Making Cities Awesome: Peregrine’s Nick Noone & Ben Rudolph
Most public safety technology companies grow by collecting more data. Peregrine inverted the model: no sensors, no new data, a business built on connecting the data and information cities already own. Co-founders Nick Noone and Ben Rudolph received more than two dozen no's before San Pablo PD let them in the door in February 2018. Today, Peregrine powers law enforcement, emergency medical services
Parallel’s Parag Agrawal: Building a New Web for AI Agents
Parag Agrawal is making a bet that goes against two decades of web search: agents will query the web a thousand times more than humans ever have, and the infrastructure built around human clicks is wrong for them. The former Twitter CEO, now founder and CEO of Parallel Web Systems, explains why Parallel treats human click data as a bug and trains on agent feedback instead. He unpacks the counterin
Rich Sutton and Khurram Javed: Why AI Models Stop Learning, and How to Start It Again
Rich Sutton, who helped pioneer reinforcement learning and wrote the seminal AI essay The Bitter Lesson, has now cofounded Oak Lab with his former student Khurram Javed. Their goal: to build agents that continuously learn from their own experience rather than from us. Rich doesn't think he holds a radical view: "I'm not weird. The field is weird." He says all learning is continual, and the field i
Chai Discovery's Bitter Lesson: Drug Design Is Another Scaling Problem
Most people treat biology as a bespoke, messy science. Josh Meier and Matt McPartlon, co-founders of Chai Discovery, treat it as an engineering problem. They make the case that drug design obeys the bitter lesson: scale data, models, and compute, and the model can learn what a hand-built pipeline simply couldn't capture. The results are concrete: Chai-2 pushed de novo antibody design from a sub 0.
Building the Automated AGI Lab: Core Automation's Jerry Tworek and Rohan Anil
Jerry Tworek led reasoning at OpenAI, convinced that scaling reinforcement learning was the path to AGI. Rohan Anil co-led Gemini pre-training and built the Shampoo optimizer. Now they've teamed up at Core Automation on a contrarian premise: the transformer has carried us as far as it can, and the bottleneck to smarter systems is no longer scale — it's the architecture itself. The missing capabili
Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming ‘Dark Factory’ Where Software Builds Itself
Factory started building fully autonomous coding agents in April 2023, two years before enterprises were ready. Matan Grinberg now says this is indistinguishable from being wrong. The Factory co-founder and CEO explains how the company survived its "journey in the desert," including the decision to hand nearly all of its revenue back to customers when the product wasn't making developers obsessed.
Anthropic's Katelyn Lesse & Angela Jiang: Building an Ecosystem, not a Walled Garden
Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang lead the team building Anthropic's developer platform - the layer that both outside builders and Anthropic's own products run on top of. Angela frames the platform as a three-layer stack: knowledge, execution, and coordination. She argues the real leverage is what’s at the top: "strategies," or meta-harnesses that give each token a different job, from advising to exe
Inside Zipline's Autonomous System: 140M Miles, Zero Incidents
The largest commercial autonomous system on earth isn't a robotaxi fleet — it's Zipline, which has flown 140 million autonomous miles with zero safety incidents. Co-founder Keller Rinaudo Cliffton and Eric Watson, who leads systems engineering and safety, explain why the drone itself is only 15% of the solution. The rest spans inventory management, air traffic integration, and engineering systems
Why Hardware-Software Co-Design Is AI's Real 100x: Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis
Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis, argues the biggest gains in AI don't come from faster chips, they come from software-hardware co-design. Optimizing the model, the kernels, and the silicon together turns a 2x here and a 2x there into 100x. He explains why DeepSeek's experts were shaped for Nvidia's Hopper (and why TPUs struggle to run it), why OpenAI's sparser models and Anthropic's denser on
Memory and Continual Learning: Engram's Dan Biderman and Jessy Lin
Dan Biderman and Jessy Lin, co-founders of Engram, are building a neolab around memory and continual learning, which they call two sides of the same coin. Their contrarian premise: instead of stuffing ever-larger prompts into the context window or bolting on RAG, bake a team's knowledge directly into the model's weights, so it knows your company the way an employee of several years does.
The pay
Simulating Humans at Scale: Simile's Joon Sung Park
The race to build superintelligence is producing models that keep getting better at objective problems, but not at behaving like actual people. Joon Sung Park, founder and CEO of Simile and creator of Stanford's "Smallville" generative agents study, argues that simulating human society requires a fundamentally different kind of model. He frames today's frontier models as the "CPU of intelligence"—
Google DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick: Why the Model Eats the Harness
The entire startup ecosystem is racing to build agent harnesses. Logan Kilpatrick, who leads Google AI Studio and the Gemini API, argues that scramble has a roughly 12-month shelf life. Models will absorb the scaffolding and run it natively, so the edge moves elsewhere. Google's own bet runs in parallel: a single agent harness, born from the Windsurf team and now called Antigravity, has become the
LIVE: Jensen Huang on Building the Dynamo of the Intelligence Age
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, makes the case that computing is undergoing its biggest shift in 60 years: from retrieval, where data centers store files we look up, to generation, where every word, image, and video is produced in real time and customized for whoever is asking. He explains why NVIDIA's AI factories are the dynamos of this era: machines that take in electrons and send out
Knowing What Your Customers Want, All the Time: Listen Labs' Alfred Wahlforss
Alfred Wahlforss, co-founder and CEO of Listen Labs, is building an AI agent that interviews your customers at a scale no focus group ever could—thousands of voice conversations at once, drawn from an audience of 30 million people. A year after launch, Listen serves hundreds of Fortune 100s to Startups including Microsoft, Google, NBC Universal, P&G, Anthropic, Cursor, and Cognition. Alfred explai
How Cursor Trained Composer on Fireworks: Distributed Infrastructure for High-Performance RL
Cursor's Federico Cassano and Fireworks' Dmytro Dzhulgakov explain how they collaborated to build Composer as a specialized foundation model. The core insight: models have finite capacity in their weights, and allocating all those bits to the singular task of software engineering in Cursor frees the model to be both better at the task and far more efficient at inference. Rather than start from pre
Rebuilding IT From the Ground Up for the AI Age: Serval's Jake Stauch
Jake Stauch, founder and CEO of Serval, is building a ServiceNow for the AI era. His most contrarian bet is that the product should look like boring old enterprise software, but with unlimited intelligence. Serval's architecture splits work between two agents: an admin agent that uses code generation to spin up workflows from natural language, and a help desk agent that can only act through the to
Suno's Mikey Shulman: Everyone Can Make Music Now
Most music platforms assume you're a listener. On Suno, 90% of daily users make something. Founder and CEO Mikey Shulman explains why that flips the model: the act of creating IS the entertainment, with closer parallels to gaming and Claude Code than to Spotify. He breaks down the technical bets that got them here — modeling raw sound waves instead of encoding music theory, choosing autoregressio
ElevenLabs' Mati Staniszewski: How Voice Becomes the Interface for Everything
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, joins Sequoia partner Andrew Reed at AI Ascent 2026 to talk about how a four-year-old company built a frontier audio AI business with just over 400 people and over $400M in revenue. He explains why audio was overlooked in 2022 when the rest of AI was chasing text and images, why ElevenLabs chose to monetize from day one rather than raise indefin
Anthropic's Boris Cherny: Coding's Printing Press Moment
Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, joins Sequoia partner Lauren Reeder at AI Ascent 2026 to talk about where coding goes from here. He explains why he hasn't written a line of code in 2026, why he now ships dozens of PRs a day from his phone, and why he believes coding is effectively solved — at least for the code he writes. Also: why loops are the future, why he thinks Claude Code
Waymo's Dmitri Dolgov: 20 Million Rides and the Road to Full Autonomy
Dmitri Dolgov, co-CEO of Waymo, joins Sequoia partner Konstantine Buhler at AI Ascent 2026 to talk about the 20-year arc from the DARPA Grand Challenge to fully autonomous service in eleven cities and counting. He explains how Waymo persisted through every AV hype cycle by treating safety as the non-negotiable foundation, why exponential scaling is finally here (10 of Waymo's 20 million autonomous
OpenAI's Greg Brockman: Why Human Attention Is the New Bottleneck
Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, joins Sequoia partner Alfred Lin at AI Ascent 2026 for a conversation that spans the full OpenAI stack. He explains why the company will never have enough compute, why he believes we're 80% of the way to AGI, and why the agentic coding tools that wrote 20% of your code last December are now writing 80% of it. Also: why human attention is becoming
Demis Hassabis on Building DeepMind, AlphaFold, and the Final Stretch to AGI
Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and 2024 Nobel laureate in chemistry for AlphaFold, joins Sequoia partner Konstantine Buhler at AI Ascent 2026 for a wide-ranging conversation about the path to AGI and what comes after. He explains why he believes AGI is achievable by 2030, why drug discovery could collapse from ten years to days, and why we should think of information, not ma
Andrej Karpathy: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
Andrej Karpathy (co-founder of OpenAI, former head of AI at Tesla, and now founder of Eureka Labs) talks with Sequoia partner Stephanie Zhan at AI Ascent 2026 about what's changed in the year since he coined "vibe coding." He explains why he's never felt more behind as a programmer, why agentic engineering is the more serious discipline taking shape on top of vibe coding, and why we should think o
From SEO to Agent-Led Growth: Profound’s James Cadwallader
James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO of Profound, makes the case that we are living through the biggest platform shift in marketing history. The front door of the internet hasn't changed, but the visitor walking through it has. Where consumers once clicked blue links, AI agents now crawl the web on their behalf, synthesizing answers and steering purchase decisions at scale.
James explains why
How Autonomous Labs Will Transform Scientific Research: Ginkgo Bioworks’ Jason Kelly
Jason Kelly founded Ginkgo Bioworks in 2008 with a simple but radical idea: DNA is code, and cells are programmable. Sixteen years later, AI is finally making that vision real in ways that could reshape science itself. Jason describes a landmark collaboration with OpenAI in which a reasoning model with access to a robotic lab beat the state of the art in biochemistry by 40% - not by being smarter
Greetings, Earthlings: Philip Johnston of Starcloud on Data Centers in Space
Philip Johnston, founder and CEO of Starcloud, explains why space will become the primary location for AI compute infrastructure within the next decade. After witnessing SpaceX's massive manufacturing scale at Starbase, Philip realized that declining launch costs would make space-based data centers cheaper than terrestrial ones. He breaks down the physics of heat dissipation in vacuum, the economi
Physics Gets a Vote: Nominal Cofounders on Hardware Development in an AI World
Nominal’s cofounders (Cameron McCord, Jason Hoch and Bryce Strauss) realized that the new age of reindustrialization requires a new approach to hardware engineering and testing that’s closer to how software is developed. They founded Nominal with the insight that while SpaceX, Tesla, and Anduril built proprietary internal platforms for hardware testing, the thousands of new hardware entrants can'
Building the GitHub for RL Environments: Prime Intellect's Will Brown & Johannes Hagemann
Will Brown and Johannes Hagemann of Prime Intellect discuss the shift from static prompting to "environment-based" AI development, and their Environments Hub, a platform designed to democratize frontier-level training.
The conversation highlights a major shift: AI progress is moving toward Recursive Language Models that manage their own context and agentic RL that scales through trial and error.
What’s the Future of Vertical SaaS in an AGI World? Jamie Cuffe, CEO of Pace
Jamie Cuffe is solving one of AI's hardest problems: getting conservative, regulated industries to trust autonomous agents with mission-critical work. At Pace, he's building AI that replaces traditional BPOs in insurance, handling everything from email triage to claims processing with 50-75% cost savings. Drawing on his experience at Retool, Jamie emphasizes the importance of "closing the distance
Making the Case for the Terminal as AI's Workbench: Warp’s Zach Lloyd
Zach Lloyd built Warp to modernize the terminal for professional developers, but the rise of coding agents transformed his company's trajectory. He discusses the convergence of IDEs and terminals into new workbenches built for prompting and agent orchestration, and why he thinks "coding will be solved" within a few years, making human expression of intent the ultimate bottleneck. Zach explains how
Context Engineering Our Way to Long-Horizon Agents: LangChain’s Harrison Chase
Harrison Chase, cofounder of LangChain and pioneer of AI agent frameworks, discusses the emergence of long-horizon agents that can work autonomously for extended periods.
Harrison breaks down the evolution from early scaffolding approaches to today's harness-based architectures, explaining why context engineering - not just better models - has become fundamental to agent development.
He shares
How Ricursive Intelligence’s Founders are Using AI to Shape The Future of Chip Design
Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini created AlphaChip at Google, using AI to design four generations of TPUs and reducing chip floor planning from months to hours. They explain how chip design has become the critical bottleneck for AI progress -- a process that typically takes years and costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Now at Ricursive Intelligence, they're enabling an evolution of the industr
Training General Robots for Any Task: Physical Intelligence’s Karol Hausman and Tobi Springenberg
Physical Intelligence’s Karol Hausman and Tobi Springenberg believe that robotics has been held back not by hardware limitations, but by an intelligence bottleneck that foundation models can solve. Their end-to-end learning approach combines vision, language, and action into models like π0 and π*0.6, enabling robots to learn generalizable behaviors rather than task-specific programs. The team prio
Why the Next AI Revolution Will Happen Off-Screen: Samsara CEO Sanjit Biswas
Sanjit Biswas is one of the rare founders who has scaled AI in the physical world – first with Meraki, and now with Samsara, a $20B+ public company with sensors deployed across millions of vehicles and job sites. Capturing 90 billion miles of driving data each year, Samsara operates at a scale matched only by a small handful of companies. Sanjit discusses why physical AI is fundamentally different
The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed
fal is building the infrastructure layer for the generative media boom. In this episode, founders Gorkem Yurtseven, Burkay Gur, and Head of Engineering Batuhan Taskaya explain why video models present a completely different optimization problem than LLMs, one that is compute-bound, architecturally volatile, and changing every 30 days. They discuss how fal's tracing compiler, custom kernels, and gl
Why IDEs Won't Die in the Age of AI Coding: Zed Founder Nathan Sobo
Nathan Sobo has spent nearly two decades pursuing one goal: building an IDE that combines the power of full-featured tools like JetBrains with the responsiveness of lightweight editors like Vim. After hitting the performance ceiling with web-based Atom, he founded Zed and rebuilt from scratch in Rust with GPU-accelerated rendering. Now with 170,000 active developers, Zed is positioned at the inter
How End-to-End Learning Created Autonomous Driving 2.0: Wayve CEO Alex Kendall
Alex Kendall founded Wayve in 2017 with a contrarian vision: replace the hand-engineered autonomous vehicle stack with end-to-end deep learning. While AV 1.0 companies relied on HD maps, LiDAR retrofits, and city-by-city deployments, Wayve built a generalization-first approach that can adapt to new vehicles and cities in weeks. Alex explains how world models enable reasoning in complex scenarios,
How Google’s Nano Banana Achieved Breakthrough Character Consistency
When Google launched Nano Banana, it instantly became a global phenomenon, introducing an image model that finally made it possible for people to see themselves in AI-generated worlds. In this episode, Nicole Brichtova and Hansa Srinivasan, the product and engineering leads behind Nano Banana, share the story behind the model’s creation and what it means for the future of visual AI.
Nicole and Ha
OpenAI Sora 2 Team: How Generative Video Will Unlock Creativity and World Models
The OpenAI Sora 2 team (Bill Peebles, Thomas Dimson, Rohan Sahai) discuss how they compressed filmmaking from months to days, enabling anyone to create compelling video. Bill, who invented the diffusion transformer that powers Sora and most video generation models, explains how space-time tokens enable object permanence and physics understanding in AI-generated video, and why Sora 2 represents a l
Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan: Scaling Beyond Moore's Law to Million-GPU Clusters
Recorded live at Sequoia’s Europe100 event: Michael Kagan, co-founder of Mellanox and CTO of Nvidia, explains how the $7 billion Mellanox acquisition helped transform Nvidia from a chip company into the architect of AI infrastructure. Kagan breaks down the technical challenges of scaling from single GPUs to 100K and eventually million-GPU data centers. He reveals why network performance—not just c
Securing the AI Frontier: Irregular Co-founder Dan Lahav
Irregular co-founder Dan Lahav is redefining what cybersecurity means in the age of autonomous AI. Working closely with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, Dan, co-founder Omer Nevo and team are pioneering “frontier AI security”—a proactive approach to safeguarding systems where AI models act as independent agents.
Dan shares how emergent behaviors, from models socially engineering each ot
Why AI Will Transform Customer Experience: Cresta CEO Ping Wu and Sequoia’s Doug Leone
Ping Wu built Google's contact center business before becoming CEO of Cresta, where he's pioneering a unique approach to contact center transformation. Rather than full automation Ping advocates a dual approach, automating what's ready while using AI to assist humans with the rest. He makes the case for an abundance mindset—imagining new customer experiences like talking to airline apps or turning
Block CTO Dhanji Prasanna: Building the AI-First Enterprise with Goose, their Open Source Agent
As CTO of Block, Dhanji Prasanna has overseen a dramatic enterprise AI transformation, with engineers saving 8-10 hours a week through AI automation. Block’s open-source agent goose connects to existing enterprise tools through MCP, enabling everyone from engineers to sales teams to build custom applications without coding. Dhanji shares how Block reorganized from business unit silos to functional
Why Businesses Are Rejecting the AI They’ve Asked For: Agency CEO Elias Torres
Elias Torres has been building AI systems since 1999, from chatbots at IBM to co-founding Drift and now Agency. He believes businesses are caught in an expectation mismatch—demanding AI while rejecting it due to imperfection anxiety. Drawing from his experience scaling HubSpot, Elias explains why human-led customer experience doesn’t scale and how Agency is building AI-first solutions that work au
Building the "App Store" for Robots: Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf on Physical AI
Thomas Wolf, co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, explains how his company is applying the same community-driven approach that made transformers accessible to everyone to the emerging field of robotics. Thomas discusses LeRobot, Hugging Face's ambitious project to democratize robotics through open-source tools, datasets, and affordable hardware. He shares his vision for turning mi
Deal Velocity, Not Billable Hours: How Crosby Uses AI to Redefine Legal Contracting
Ryan Daniels and John Sarihan are reimagining legal services by building Crosby, an AI-powered law firm that focuses on contract negotiations to start. Rather than building legal software, they've structured their company as an actual law firm with lawyers and AI engineers working side-by-side to automate human negotiations. They've eliminated billable hours in favor of per-document pricing, achie
n8n CEO Jan Oberhauser on Building the Universal AI Automation Layer
When the AI wave hit, n8n founder Jan Oberhauser faced a critical choice: become irrelevant or become indispensable. He chose the latter, transforming n8n from a simple workflow tool into a comprehensive AI automation platform that lets users connect any LLM to any application. The result? Four times the revenue growth in eight months compared to the previous six years. Jan explains how n8n’s “con
Scaling the ‘Cursor for Slides’ to $50M ARR: Gamma founder Jon Noronha
Before ChatGPT made AI mainstream, John Noronha was building Gamma with a simple insight: everyone hates making slides but needs visual communication for high-stakes ideas. His background at Optimizely proved crucial as Gamma became a testing laboratory for AI models, running hundreds of experiments to discover that Claude excels at creative taste, Gemini wins on cost efficiency, and reasoning mod
Delphi’s Dara Ladjevardian: How AI Digital Minds Can Scale Human Connection
Dara Ladjevardian, founder and CEO of Delphi, is creating digital minds that allow people to scale their thoughts and availability without replacing human connection. Inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s theory of mind as a hierarchy of pattern recognizers, Dara built an adaptive temporal knowledge graph that captures how people think and reason. From helping CEOs train new hires to enabling coaches to mone
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch: Building the Generative Web with AI
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch has spent years obsessing over reducing the friction between having an idea and getting it online. Now with AI, he's achieving something even more ambitious: making software creation accessible to anyone with a keyboard. Guillermo explains how v0 has grown to 3 million users by focusing on reliability and quality, why ChatGPT has become their fastest-growing customer acq
OpenAI’s IMO Team on Why Models Are Finally Solving Elite-Level Math
In just two months, a scrappy three-person team at OpenAI sprinted to fulfill what the entire AI field has been chasing for years—gold-level performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad problems. Alex Wei, Sheryl Hsu and Noam Brown discuss their unique approach using general-purpose reinforcement learning techniques on hard-to-verify tasks rather than formal verification tools. The model
OpenAI Just Released ChatGPT Agent, Its Most Powerful Agent Yet
Isa Fulford, Casey Chu, and Edward Sun from OpenAI's ChatGPT agent team reveal how they combined Deep Research and Operator into a single, powerful AI agent that can perform complex, multi-step tasks lasting up to an hour. By giving the model access to a virtual computer with text browsing, visual browsing, terminal access, and API integrations—all with shared state—they've created what may be the
DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli on AI's Scientific Revolution
Pushmeet Kohli leads AI for Science at DeepMind, where his team has created AlphaEvolve, an AI system that discovers entirely new algorithms and proves mathematical results that have eluded researchers for decades. From improving 50-year-old matrix multiplication algorithms to generating interpretable code for complex problems like data center scheduling, AlphaEvolve represents a new paradigm wher
Mapping the Mind of a Neural Net: Goodfire’s Eric Ho on the Future of Interpretability
Eric Ho is building Goodfire to solve one of AI’s most critical challenges: understanding what’s actually happening inside neural networks. His team is developing techniques to understand, audit and edit neural networks at the feature level. Eric discusses breakthrough results in resolving superposition through sparse autoencoders, successful model editing demonstrations and real-world application
ElevenLabs’ Mati Staniszewski: Why Voice Will Be the Fundamental Interface for Tech
Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, explains how staying laser-focused on audio innovation has allowed his company to thrive despite the push into multimodality from foundation models. From a high school friendship in Poland to building one of the fastest-growing AI companies, Mati shares how ElevenLabs transformed text-to-speech with contextual understanding and emotional deliver
From DevOps ‘Heart Attacks’ to AI-Powered Diagnostics With Traversal’s AI Agents
Anish Agarwal and Raj Agrawal, co-founders of Traversal, are transforming how enterprises handle critical system failures. Their AI agents can perform root cause analysis in 2-4 minutes instead of the hours typically spent by teams of engineers scrambling in Slack channels. Drawing from their academic research in causal inference and gene regulatory networks, they’ve built agents that systematical
The Breakthroughs Needed for AGI Have Already Been Made: OpenAI Former Research Head Bob McGrew
As OpenAI's former Head of Research, Bob McGrew witnessed the company's evolution from GPT-3’s breakthrough to today's reasoning models. He argues that there are three legs of the stool for AGI—Transformers, scaled pre-training, and reasoning—and that the fundamentals that will shape the next decade-plus are already in place. He thinks 2025 will be defined by reasoning while pre-training hits dimi
OpenAI Codex Team: From Coding Autocomplete to Asynchronous Autonomous Agents
Hanson Wang and Alexander Embiricos from OpenAI's Codex team discuss their latest AI coding agent that works independently in its own environment for up to 30 minutes, generating full pull requests from simple task descriptions. They explain how they trained the model beyond competitive programming to match real-world software engineering needs, the shift from pairing with AI to delegating to auto
Google I/O Afterparty: The Future of Human-AI Collaboration, From Veo to Mariner
Fresh off impressive releases at Google’s I/O event, three Google Labs leaders explain how they’re reimagining creative tools and productivity workflows. Thomas Iljic details how video generation is merging filmmaking with gaming through generative AI cameras and world-building interfaces in Whisk and Veo. Jaclyn Konzelmann demonstrates how Project Mariner evolved from a disruptive browser takeove
From Data Centers to Dyson Spheres: P-1 AI's Path to Hardware Engineering AGI
Former Airbus CTO Paul Eremenko shares his vision for bringing AI to physical engineering, starting with Archie—an AI agent that works alongside human engineers. P-1 AI is tackling the challenge of generating synthetic training data to teach AI systems about complex physical systems, from data center cooling to aircraft design and beyond. Eremenko explains how Archie breaks down engineering tasks
Gong’s Amit Bendov: From Meeting Recordings to Revenue AI
CEO Amit Bendov shares how Gong evolved from a meeting transcription tool to an AI-powered revenue platform that's increasing sales capacity by up to 60%. He explains why task-specific AI agents are the key to enterprise adoption, and why human accountability will remain crucial even as AI takes over routine sales tasks. Amit also reveals how Gong survived recent market headwinds by expanding thei
LIVE: Google's Jeff Dean on the Coming Transformations in AI
At AI Ascent 2025, Jeff Dean makes bold predictions. Discover how the pioneer behind Google's TPUs and foundational AI research sees the technology evolving, from specialized hardware to more organic systems, and future engineering capabilities.
LIVE: Ambient Agents and the New Agent Inbox ft. Harrison Chase of LangChain
Recorded live at Sequoia’s AI Ascent 2025: LangChain CEO Harrison Chase introduces the concept of ambient agents, AI systems that operate continuously in the background responding to events rather than direct human prompts. Learn how these agents differ from traditional chatbots, why human oversight remains essential and how this approach could dramatically scale our ability to leverage AI.
LIVE: How AI is Reinventing Software Business Models ft. Bret Taylor of Sierra
Recorded live at Sequoia’s AI Ascent 2025: Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor discusses why AI is driving a fundamental shift from subscription-based pricing to outcomes-based models. Learn why this transition is harder for incumbents than startups, why applied AI and vertical specialization represent the biggest opportunities for entrepreneurs and how to position your AI company for success in this ne
LIVE: Sam Altman of OpenAI on Building the ‘Core AI Subscription’ for Your Life
Recorded live at Sequoia’s AI Ascent 2025: Sam reflects on OpenAI’s evolution from a 14-person research lab to a dominant AI platform. He envisions transforming ChatGPT into a deeply personal AI service that remembers your entire life's context—from conversations to emails—while working seamlessly across all services. Sam describes the generation gap in how users engage with ChatGPT, and makes sur
Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach: Building the System of Record for the AI Era
Workday CEO and Sequoia partner Carl Eschenbach explains how the company is evolving its platform to handle both human and AI workers. He shares Workday’s three-pronged approach to monetizing AI through seat-based pricing, role-based agents and consumption-based API access. Eschenbach discusses why domain-specific agents with curated data will be more valuable than general-purpose models in the en
The Quest to ‘Solve All Diseases’ with AI: Isomorphic Labs’ Max Jaderberg
After pioneering reinforcement learning breakthroughs at DeepMind with Capture the Flag and AlphaStar, Max Jaderberg aims to revolutionize drug discovery with AI as Chief AI Officer of Isomorphic Labs, which was spun out of DeepMind. He discusses how AlphaFold 3's diffusion-based architecture enables unprecedented understanding of molecular interactions, and why we're approaching a "Move 37 moment
Pricing in the AI Era: From Inputs to Outcomes, with Paid CEO Manny Medina
Former Outreach CEO Manny Medina discusses his new company Paid, which provides billing, pricing and margin management tools for AI companies. He explains why traditional SaaS pricing models don’t work for AI businesses, and breaks down emerging approaches like outcome-based and agent-based pricing. Manny shares why he believes focused AI applications targeting specific workflows will win over bro
Arc Institute's Patrick Hsu on Building an App Store for Biology with AI
Patrick Hsu, co-founder of Arc Institute, discusses the opportunities for AI in biology beyond just drug development, and how Evo 2, their new biology foundation model, is enabling a broad ecosystem of applications. Evo 2 was trained on a vast dataset of genomic data to learn evolutionary patterns that would have taken years to find; as a result, the model can be used for applications from identif
Replit CEO Amjad Masad on 1 Billion Developers: A Better End State than AGI?
Amjad Masad set out more than a decade ago to pursue the dream of unleashing 1B software creators around the world. With millions of Replit users pre-ChatGPT, that vision was already becoming a reality. Turbocharged by LLMs, the vision of enabling anyone to code—from 12-year-olds in India to knowledge workers in the U.S.—seems less and less radical. In this episode, Amjad explains how an explosion
Why CRM Needs an AI Revolution, with Day.ai Founder Christopher O’Donnell
Christopher O’Donnell believes the fundamental problems with CRM—incomplete data, complex workflows, siloed work products and the fear of leads falling through the cracks—can finally be solved through AI. Founder of Day.ai and former Chief Product Officer of HubSpot, Christopher explains how his team is building a system that automatically captures the full context of customer relationships while
From Software Engineers to AI Word Artisans: Filip Kozera of Wordware
Filip Kozera sees parallels between Excel’s democratization of data analytics and Wordware’s mission to put AI development in the hands of knowledge workers. Drawing inspiration from Excel’s 750 million users (compared to 30 million software developers), Wordware is creating tools that balance the rigid structure of programming with the fuzziness of natural language. Filip explains why effective A
Josh Woodward: Google Labs is Rapidly Building AI Products from 0-to-1
As VP of Google Labs, Josh Woodward leads teams exploring the frontiers of AI applications. He shares insights on their rapid development process, why today’s written prompts will become outdated and how AI is transforming everything from video generation to computer control. He reveals that 25% of Google’s code is now written by AI and explains why coding could see major leaps forward this year.
How AI Breakout Harvey is Transforming Legal Services, with CEO Winston Weinberg
Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg explains why success in legal AI requires more than just model capabilities—it demands deep process expertise that doesn’t exist online. He shares how Harvey balances rapid product development with earning trust from law firms through hyper-personalized demos and deep industry expertise. The discussion covers Harvey’s approach to product development—expanding specialize
The AI Product Going Viral With Doctors: OpenEvidence, with CEO Daniel Nadler
OpenEvidence is transforming how doctors access medical knowledge at the point of care, from the biggest medical establishments to small practices serving rural communities. Founder Daniel Nadler explains his team’s insight that training smaller, specialized AI models on peer-reviewed literature outperforms large general models for medical applications. He discusses how making the platform freely
OpenAI’s Deep Research Team on Why Reinforcement Learning is the Future for AI Agents
OpenAI’s Isa Fulford and Josh Tobin discuss how the company’s newest agent, Deep Research, represents a breakthrough in AI research capabilities by training models end-to-end rather than using hand-coded operational graphs. The product leads explain how high-quality training data and the o3 model’s reasoning abilities enable adaptable research strategies, and why OpenAI thinks Deep Research will c
Palo Alto Networks’ Nikesh Arora: AI, Security and the New World Order
Palo Alto Networks’s CEO Nikesh Arora dispels DeepSeek hype by detailing all of the guardrails enterprises need to have in place to give AI agents “arms and legs.” No matter the model, deploying applications for precision-use cases means superimposing better controls. Arora emphasizes that the real challenge isn’t just blocking threats but matching the accelerated pace of AI-powered attacks, requi
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