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 diminishing returns. Bob discusses why the agent economy will price services at compute costs due to near-infinite supply, fundamentally disrupting industries like law and medicine, and how his children use ChatGPT to spark curiosity and agency. From robotics breakthroughs to managing brilliant researchers, Bob offers a unique perspective on AI’s trajectory and where startups can still find defensible opportunities.

Hosted by: Stephanie Zhan and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital

Mentioned in this episode: 

Solving Rubik’s Cube with a robot hand: OpenAI’s original robotics research

Computer Use and Operator: Anthropic and OpenAI reasoning breakthroughs that originated with OpenAi researchers

Skild and Physical Intelligence: Robotics-oriented companies Bob sees as well-positioned now

Distyl: AI company founded by ex-Palintir alums to create enterprise workflows driven by proprietary data

Member of the technical staff: Title at OpenAI designed to break down barriers between AI researchers and engineers

Howie.ai: Scheduling app that Bob uses

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 autonomous agents, and their vision for a future where the majority of code is written by agents working on their own computers. The conversation covers the technical challenges of long-running inference, the importance of creating realistic training environments, and how developers are already using Codex to fix bugs and implement features at OpenAI.

Hosted by Sonya Huang and Lauren Reeder, Sequoia Capital 

Mentioned in this episode: 

The Culture: Sci-Fi series by Iain Banks portraying an optimistic view of AI

The Bitter Lesson: Influential paper by Rich Sutton on the importance of scale as a strategic unlock for AI.

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 takeover to an intelligent background assistant that remembers context across multiple tasks. Simon Tokumine reveals NotebookLM’s expansion beyond viral audio overviews into a comprehensive platform for transforming information into personalized formats. The conversation explores the shift from prompting to showing and telling, the economics of AI-powered e-commerce, and why being “too early” has become Google Labs’ biggest challenge and advantage.

Hosted by Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital

00:00 Introduction

02:12 Google's AI models and public perception

04:18 Google's history in image and video generation

06:45 Where Whisk and Flow fit

10:30 How close are we to having the ideal tool for the craft?

13:05 Where do the movie and game worlds start to merge?

16:25 Introduction to Project Mariner

17:15 How Mariner works

22:34 Mariner user behaviors

27:07 Temporary tattoos and URL memory

27:53 Project Mariner's future

29:26 Agent capabilities and use cases

31:09 E-commerce and agent interaction

35:03 Notebook LM evolution

48:26 Predictions and future of AI

Mentioned in this episode: 

Whisk: Image and video generation app for consumers

Flow: AI-powered filmmaking with new Veo 3 model

Project Mariner: research prototype exploring the future of human-agent interaction, starting with browsers

NotebookLM: tool for understanding and engaging with complex information including Audio Overviews and now a mobile app

Shop with AI Mode: Shopping app with a virtual try-on tool based on your own photos

Stitch: New prompt-based interface to design UI for mobile and web applications.

ControlNet paper: Outlined an architecture for adding conditional language to direct the outputs of image generation with diffusion models

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 into primitive operations and uses a federated approach combining multiple AI models. The goal is to progress from entry-level engineering capabilities to eventually achieving engineering AGI that can design things humans cannot.

Hosted by Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

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 their product suite while maintaining their customer-first approach.

Hosted by Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

Mentioned in this episode: 

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.

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.

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 new paradigm.

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 surprisingly specific predictions for the next 2-3 years of AI evolution.

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 enterprise, and how Workday is helping enterprises navigate the transition to an AI-powered workplace while maintaining human connection.

Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital