Podcasts · Technology · Business

Training Data

Sequoia Capital

112 episodes

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.

More about the show

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.

Episodes page 1 of 3

  1. Inside the Robot Data Factory: Mecka's Josh Gao on Sensorizing Humans to Train Robots

    · 45 min

    Robotics never got the internet's gift of free training data, so someone has to manufacture it. Josh Gao, founder and CEO of Mecka AI, runs one of the largest robot data factories, and he explains what that actually…

  2. David Silver and Lasse Espeholt of Ineffable Intelligence: A Superlearner for the Age of Experience

    · 1 h 08 min

    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…

  3. Google's AI Infrastructure Chief, Amin Vahdat, on the Physics & Economics of Frontier AI

    · 1 h 04 min

    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…

  4. Box's Aaron Levie: On Reinventing Yourself in the AI Age and Enterprise Diffusion

    · 1 h 05 min

    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…

  5. Making Cities Awesome: Peregrine’s Nick Noone & Ben Rudolph

    · 52 min

    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…

  6. Parallel’s Parag Agrawal: Building a New Web for AI Agents

    · 55 min

    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…

  7. Rich Sutton and Khurram Javed: Why AI Models Stop Learning, and How to Start It Again

    · 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…

  8. Chai Discovery's Bitter Lesson: Drug Design Is Another Scaling Problem

    · 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:…

  9. Building the Automated AGI Lab: Core Automation's Jerry Tworek and Rohan Anil

    · 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…

  10. Factory's Matan Grinberg: The Coming ‘Dark Factory’ Where Software Builds Itself

    · 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…

  11. Anthropic's Katelyn Lesse & Angela Jiang: Building an Ecosystem, not a Walled Garden

    · 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:…

  12. Inside Zipline's Autonomous System: 140M Miles, Zero Incidents

    · 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…

  13. Why Hardware-Software Co-Design Is AI's Real 100x: Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis

    · 1 h 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…

  14. Memory and Continual Learning: Engram's Dan Biderman and Jessy Lin

    · 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…

  15. Simulating Humans at Scale: Simile's Joon Sung Park

    · 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…

  16. Google DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick: Why the Model Eats the Harness

    · 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…

  17. LIVE: Jensen Huang on Building the Dynamo of the Intelligence Age

    · 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…

  18. Knowing What Your Customers Want, All the Time: Listen Labs' Alfred Wahlforss

    · 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…

  19. How Cursor Trained Composer on Fireworks: Distributed Infrastructure for High-Performance RL

    · 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…

  20. Rebuilding IT From the Ground Up for the AI Age: Serval's Jake Stauch

    · 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…

  21. Suno's Mikey Shulman: Everyone Can Make Music Now

    · 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…

  22. ElevenLabs' Mati Staniszewski: How Voice Becomes the Interface for Everything

    · 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…

  23. Anthropic's Boris Cherny: Coding's Printing Press Moment

    · 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…

  24. Waymo's Dmitri Dolgov: 20 Million Rides and the Road to Full Autonomy

    · 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…

  25. OpenAI's Greg Brockman: Why Human Attention Is the New Bottleneck

    · 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…

  26. Demis Hassabis on Building DeepMind, AlphaFold, and the Final Stretch to AGI

    · 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…

  27. Andrej Karpathy: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering

    · 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…

  28. From SEO to Agent-Led Growth: Profound’s James Cadwallader

    · 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…

  29. How Autonomous Labs Will Transform Scientific Research: Ginkgo Bioworks’ Jason Kelly

    · 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.…

  30. Greetings, Earthlings: Philip Johnston of Starcloud on Data Centers in Space

    · 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…

  31. Physics Gets a Vote: Nominal Cofounders on Hardware Development in an AI World

    · 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…

  32. Building the GitHub for RL Environments: Prime Intellect's Will Brown & Johannes Hagemann

    · 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.…

  33. What’s the Future of Vertical SaaS in an AGI World? Jamie Cuffe, CEO of Pace

    · 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…

  34. Making the Case for the Terminal as AI's Workbench: Warp’s Zach Lloyd

    · 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…

  35. Context Engineering Our Way to Long-Horizon Agents: LangChain’s Harrison Chase

    · 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…

  36. How Ricursive Intelligence’s Founders are Using AI to Shape The Future of Chip Design

    · 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…

  37. Training General Robots for Any Task: Physical Intelligence’s Karol Hausman and Tobi Springenberg

    · 1 h 02 min

    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…

  38. Why the Next AI Revolution Will Happen Off-Screen: Samsara CEO Sanjit Biswas

    · 38 min

    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.…

  39. The Rise of Generative Media: fal's Bet on Video, Infrastructure, and Speed

    · 1 h 02 min

    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…

  40. Why IDEs Won't Die in the Age of AI Coding: Zed Founder Nathan Sobo

    · 40 min

    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…

  41. How End-to-End Learning Created Autonomous Driving 2.0: Wayve CEO Alex Kendall

    · 42 min

    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…

  42. How Google’s Nano Banana Achieved Breakthrough Character Consistency

    · 44 min

    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…

  43. OpenAI Sora 2 Team: How Generative Video Will Unlock Creativity and World Models

    · 1 h 00 min

    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…

  44. Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan: Scaling Beyond Moore's Law to Million-GPU Clusters

    · 42 min

    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…

  45. Securing the AI Frontier: Irregular Co-founder Dan Lahav

    · 44 min

    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…

  46. Why AI Will Transform Customer Experience: Cresta CEO Ping Wu and Sequoia’s Doug Leone

    · 45 min

    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,…

  47. Block CTO Dhanji Prasanna: Building the AI-First Enterprise with Goose, their Open Source Agent

    · 1 h 00 min

    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…

  48. Why Businesses Are Rejecting the AI They’ve Asked For: Agency CEO Elias Torres

    · 45 min · Explicit

    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…

  49. Building the "App Store" for Robots: Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf on Physical AI

    · 43 min

    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…

  50. Deal Velocity, Not Billable Hours: How Crosby Uses AI to Redefine Legal Contracting

    · 50 min

    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…

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