François Chollet on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.

François Chollet is a leading voice in AI. He's the creator of the Keras library, author of Deep Learning with Python, and the founder of the ARC Prize, a global competition aimed at measuring true general intelligence.

He's spent years thinking deeply about what intelligence actually is—and why scaling up today’s AI models isn’t enough to reach it.

In this talk, he walks through the limits of pretraining and memorized skills, and lays out a path toward true general intelligence—AI that can adapt on the fly, reason in new situations, and invent novel solutions. He explains why abstraction and compositionality matter, how ARC became the benchmark for progress, and what his team at a new research lab called Ndea is building next.

A fireside with Dr. Fei-Fei Li on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Dr. Fei-Fei Li is often called the godmother of AI—and for good reason. Before the world had AI as we know it, she was helping build the foundation.In this fireside, she recounts the creation of ImageNet, a project that helped ignite the deep learning revolution by providing the data backbone modern computer vision needed. She walks through the early belief in data-driven methods, the shock of seeing convolutional networks outperform expectations in 2012, and how those breakthroughs led to captioning, storytelling, and ultimately, generative models.Now, she’s taking on one of AI’s hardest frontiers: spatial intelligence. Fei-Fei shares why modeling the 3D world is essential for AGI—and why it may be even more difficult than language.

Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, has backed some of the most iconic consumer brands of the past two decades — from Warby Parker to Chime to Dollar Shave Club.

In this conversation with Garry, she shares how great products (not marketing tricks) still win, why AI is unlocking a new kind of emotional relationship between consumers and technology, and what founders can learn from the messy creative stage we're in right now. She also breaks down how shifts in distribution, wellness, and digital behavior are reshaping what it means to build for real human needs.

A fireside with Satya Nadella on June 17, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Satya Nadella started at Microsoft in 1992 as an engineer. Three decades later, he’s now Chairman & CEO, navigating the company through one of the most profound technological shifts yet: the rise of AI.In this conversation, he shares how Microsoft is thinking about this moment— from the infrastructure needed to train frontier models, to the social permission required to use that compute. He draws parallels to the early PC and internet eras, breaks down what makes a great team, and reflects on what he’d build if he were starting his career today.

A fireside with Sam Altman at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Sam Altman grew up obsessed with technology, broke into the Stanford mainframe as a kid, and dropped out to start his first company before turning 20.In this conversation, he traces the path from early startup struggles to building OpenAI—sharing what he’s learned about ambition, the weight of responsibility, and how to keep building when the whole world is watching. He opens up about the hardest moments of his career, the limits of personal productivity, and why, in the end, it's all still about finding people you like working with and doing something that matters.

A fireside with Elon Musk at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Before rockets and robots, Elon Musk was drilling holes through his office floor to borrow internet. In this candid talk, he walks through the early days of Zip2, the Falcon 1 launches that nearly ended SpaceX, and the “miracle” of Tesla surviving 2008. He shares the thinking that guided him—building from first principles, doing useful things, and the belief that we’re in the middle of an intelligence big bang.

Andrej Karpathy's keynote at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Drawing on his work at Stanford, OpenAI, and Tesla, Andrej sees a shift underway. Software is changing, again. We’ve entered the era of “Software 3.0,” where natural language becomes the new programming interface and models do the rest.He explores what this shift means for developers, users, and the design of software itself— that we're not just using new tools, but building a new kind of computer.

Slides provided by Andrej: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a0h1mkwfmV2PlekxDN8isMrDA5evc4wW/view?usp=sharing

Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, joins Garry to talk about building one of the fastest-growing startups of all time—and why he's betting on a future beyond code. He walks through the early insights that led his team to leave a promising AI-powered CAD project and instead chase a bigger dream: reinventing how software is written. From years of false starts and rewrites to Cursor's breakthrough moment, Michael explains what it takes to build a tool that could eventually replace programming as we know it. He also reflects on their first 10 hires, why taste still matters and how the decade ahead will unlock a new kind of creativity for builders everywhere.

Fusion may still sound like science fiction— but it might not be for much longer. With AI pushing demand for clean power to new highs, a breakthrough may finally be close.

For Decoded, YC General Partner Gustaf Alstromer traces the history of fusion, the physics behind it, and the engineering challenges that stalled it for nearly a century.

He also looks at how Helion is approaching the problem differently, as they develop a new fusion system expected to deliver power to Microsoft by 2028.

In this episode of The Breakdown, Tom and Dave are joined by fellow YC General Partner Pete Koomen to lay out a new vision for how AI should actually work: not as a chatbot bolted onto legacy software, but as a customizable tool that helps people offload the work they don't want to do.

From editable system prompts to agents that act more like collaborators, they dig into what it means to build AI-native software—and why the future belongs to products that let users teach machines how to think.