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...
Dust’s Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu: Getting the Most From AI With Multiple Custom Agents
Founded in early 2023 after spending years at Stripe and OpenAI, Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu started Dust with the view that one model will not rule them all, and that multi-model integration will be key to getting the most value out of AI assistants. In this episode we’ll hear why they believe the proprietary data you have in silos will be key to unlocking the full power of AI, get their perspective on the evolving model landscape, and how AI can augment rather than replace human capabilities.
Hosted by: Konstantine Buhler and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital
00:00 - Introduction
02:16 - One model will not rule them all
07:15 - Reasoning breakthroughs
11:15 - Trends in AI models
13:32 - The future of the open source ecosystem
16:16 - Model quality and performance
21:44 - “No GPUs before PMF”
27:24 - Dust in action
37:40 - How do you find “the makers”
42:36 - The beliefs Dust lives by
50:03 - Keeping the human in the loop
52:33 - Second time founders
56:15 - Lightning round
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1:03:07
Clay’s Kareem Amin on Building the Sales ‘System of Action’ with AI
Clay is leveraging AI to help go-to-market teams unleash creativity and be more effective in their work, powering custom workflows for everything from targeted outreach to personalized landing pages. It’s one of the fastest growing AI-native applications, with over 4,500 customers and 100,000 users. Founder and CEO Kareem Amin describes Clay’s technology, and its approach to balancing imagination and automation in order to help its customers achieve new levels of go-to-market success.
Hosted by: Alfred Lin, Sequoia Capital
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51:38
Decart’s Dean Leitersdorf on AI-Generated Video Games and Worlds
Can GenAI allow us to connect our imagination to what we see on our screens? Decart’s Dean Leitersdorf believes it can.
In this episode, Dean Leitersdorf breaks down how Decart is pushing the boundaries of compute in order to create AI-generated consumer experiences, from fully playable video games to immersive worlds. From achieving real-time video inference on existing hardware to building a fully vertically integrated stack, Dean explains why solving fundamental limitations rather than specific problems could lead to the next trillion-dollar company.
Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Shaun Maguire, Sequoia Capital
00:00 Introduction
03:22 About Oasis
05:25 Solving a problem vs overcoming a limitation
08:42 The role of game engines
11:15 How video real-time inference works
14:10 World model vs pixel representation
17:17 Vertical integration
34:20 Building a moat
41:35 The future of consumer entertainment
43:17 Rapid fire questions
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46:34
How Glean CEO Arvind Jain Solved the Enterprise Search Problem – and What It Means for AI at Work
Years before co-founding Glean, Arvind was an early Google employee who helped design the search algorithm. Today, Glean is building search and work assistants inside the enterprise, which is arguably an even harder problem. One of the reasons enterprise search is so difficult is that each individual at the company has different permissions and access to different documents and information, meaning that every search needs to be fully personalized. Solving this difficult ingestion and ranking problem also unlocks a key problem for AI: feeding the right context into LLMs to make them useful for your enterprise context. Arvind and his team are harnessing generative AI to synthesize, make connections, and turbo-change knowledge work. Hear Arvind’s vision for what kind of work we’ll do when work AI assistants reach their potential.
Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital
00:00 - Introduction
08:35 - Search rankings
11:30 - Retrieval-Augmented Generation
15:52 - Where enterprise search meets RAG
19:13 - How is Glean changing work?
26:08 - Agentic reasoning
31:18 - Act 2: application platform
33:36 - Developers building on Glean
35:54 - 5 years into the future
38:48 - Advice for founders
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44:48
OpenAI Researcher Dan Roberts on What Physics Can Teach Us About AI
In recent years there’s been an influx of theoretical physicists into the leading AI labs. Do they have unique capabilities suited to studying large models or is it just herd behavior? To find out, we talked to our former AI Fellow (and now OpenAI researcher) Dan Roberts.
Roberts, co-author of The Principles of Deep Learning Theory, is at the forefront of research that applies the tools of theoretical physics to another type of large complex system, deep neural networks. Dan believes that DLLs, and eventually LLMs, are interpretable in the same way a large collection of atoms is—at the system level. He also thinks that emphasis on scaling laws will balance with new ideas and architectures over time as scaling asymptotes economically.
Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital
Mentioned in this episode:
The Principles of Deep Learning Theory: An Effective Theory Approach to Understanding Neural Networks, by Daniel A. Roberts, Sho Yaida, Boris Hanin
Black Holes and the Intelligence Explosion: Extreme scenarios of AI focus on what is logically possible rather than what is physically possible. What does physics have to say about AI risk?
Yang-Mills & The Mass Gap: An unsolved Millennium Prize problem
AI Math Olympiad: Dan is on the prize committee
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.
The content of this podcast does not constitute investment advice, an offer to provide investment advisory services, or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund.