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30 episodes
Rich Sutton and Khurram Javed: Why AI Models Stop Learning, and How to Start It Again
Aug 18, 2026 · 54 min
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 is the one that needed a new name for it. Rich and Khurram argue synthetic data is "a big mistake." T…
Chai Discovery's Bitter Lesson: Drug Design Is Another Scaling Problem
Aug 4, 2026 · 47 min
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 0.1% hit rate to 16%, turning a needle-in-a-haystack search into something more like designing a key t…
Building the Automated AGI Lab: Core Automation's Jerry Tworek and Rohan Anil
Jul 29, 2026 · 49 min
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 capability is continual learning, models that adapt at test time, which transformers can't do. In-context le…
Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming ‘Dark Factory’ Where Software Builds Itself
Jul 21, 2026 · 52 min
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. Matan makes the contrarian technical case that a model-agnostic harness beats the model-and-harness…
Anthropic's Katelyn Lesse & Angela Jiang: Building an Ecosystem, not a Walled Garden
Jul 14, 2026 · 49 min
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 executing to reflecting to memory. On the question of open ecosystem vs. walled garden, they say they a…
Inside Zipline's Autonomous System: 140M Miles, Zero Incidents
Jul 7, 2026 · 55 min
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 such as a dual flight computer failover protocol that recently saved a delivery mid-flight. They tra…
Why Hardware-Software Co-Design Is AI's Real 100x: Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis
Jun 30, 2026 · 1 hr 10 min
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 ones pull them toward different hardware, and why the so-called CUDA moat was never really about CUDA.…
Memory and Continual Learning: Engram's Dan Biderman and Jessy Lin
Jun 24, 2026 · 45 min
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 payoff: matching or beating frontier models while consuming up to 100x fewer tokens. Working with partner…
Simulating Humans at Scale: Simile's Joon Sung Park
Jun 16, 2026 · 39 min
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"—rational, superhuman at problems with right answers—and Simile as creating the "GPU of intelligence,…
Google DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick: Why the Model Eats the Harness
Jun 11, 2026 · 51 min
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 connective tissue across search, the Gemini app, Cloud, and AI Studio — the role Gemini-the-model u…
LIVE: Jensen Huang on Building the Dynamo of the Intelligence Age
Jun 10, 2026 · 41 min
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 tokens of intelligence, just as Siemens' dynamo once turned motion into electricity. Jensen frames i…
Knowing What Your Customers Want, All the Time: Listen Labs' Alfred Wahlforss
Jun 2, 2026 · 40 min
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 explains the counterintuitive finding underneath it all: people are often more honest with an AI than a hu…
How Cursor Trained Composer on Fireworks: Distributed Infrastructure for High-Performance RL
May 26, 2026 · 46 min
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-training and work up, they took an unconventional top-down approach — mid-training and RL on top of…
Rebuilding IT From the Ground Up for the AI Age: Serval's Jake Stauch
May 19, 2026 · 38 min
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 tools admins explicitly approve. Jake explains why his team uses OpenAI models for end-user interactio…
Suno's Mikey Shulman: Everyone Can Make Music Now
May 13, 2026 · 35 min
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 autoregression over diffusion to prioritize full songs over crisp clips, and why music isn't a scale problem the w…
ElevenLabs' Mati Staniszewski: How Voice Becomes the Interface for Everything
May 8, 2026 · 27 min
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 indefinitely, and why he believes voice will be the primary interface for agents, robots, and the next gene…
Anthropic's Boris Cherny: Coding's Printing Press Moment
May 5, 2026 · 25 min
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 itself may be 100 lines of code a year from now, and why the invention of the printing press is the…
Waymo's Dmitri Dolgov: 20 Million Rides and the Road to Full Autonomy
May 4, 2026 · 27 min
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 rides have happened in the last seven months), and how the Waymo Foundation Model — a multimodal wo…
OpenAI's Greg Brockman: Why Human Attention Is the New Bottleneck
May 1, 2026 · 28 min
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 the scarcest resource in AI-augmented work, and what it might be like to one day run an organization…
Demis Hassabis on Building DeepMind, AlphaFold, and the Final Stretch to AGI
Apr 30, 2026 · 27 min
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 matter or energy, as the most fundamental substance in the universe. Also: what Einstein would tell us…
Andrej Karpathy: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
Apr 30, 2026 · 30 min
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 of LLMs not as animals but as ghosts: jagged, statistical, summoned entities that require a new kind…
From SEO to Agent-Led Growth: Profound’s James Cadwallader
Apr 14, 2026 · 31 min
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 Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude all recommend brands differently, why mapping AI visibility onto traditiona…
How Autonomous Labs Will Transform Scientific Research: Ginkgo Bioworks’ Jason Kelly
Mar 24, 2026 · 58 min
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 than scientists, but by running experiments 24 hours a day and sharing data across a hundred paralle…
Greetings, Earthlings: Philip Johnston of Starcloud on Data Centers in Space
Mar 17, 2026 · 44 min
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 economics of solar power without atmosphere, and why the marginal cost of space infrastructure decreases wh…
Physics Gets a Vote: Nominal Cofounders on Hardware Development in an AI World
Mar 10, 2026 · 41 min
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't afford to replicate that work. Nominal serves as the system of record for hardware testing, helping…
Building the GitHub for RL Environments: Prime Intellect's Will Brown & Johannes Hagemann
Feb 10, 2026 · 45 min
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. Will and Johannes describe their vision for the future in which every company will become an AI resea…
What’s the Future of Vertical SaaS in an AGI World? Jamie Cuffe, CEO of Pace
Feb 3, 2026 · 52 min
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" with customers through forward-deployed engineering and being "the rock" that clients can rely on.…
Making the Case for the Terminal as AI's Workbench: Warp’s Zach Lloyd
Jan 27, 2026 · 48 min
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 Warp competes against subsidized tools from Anthropic and OpenAI, and why the terminal's time-based…
Context Engineering Our Way to Long-Horizon Agents: LangChain’s Harrison Chase
Jan 21, 2026 · 40 min
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 insights on why coding agents are leading the way, the role of file systems in agent workflows, and how…
How Ricursive Intelligence’s Founders are Using AI to Shape The Future of Chip Design
Jan 14, 2026 · 37 min
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 industry from “fabless” to "designless," where any company can create custom silicon with Ricursive Intelli…
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