Latest Interviews
Showing 1–9 of 9 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Sequoia Capital25 min
Neuralink's DJ Seo: Inside the Race to Connect Brains and AI
DJ Seo, Shaun Maguire, Sean McGuire
Neuralink is advancing its brain-computer interface technology through the deployment of two therapeutic products, Telepathy and Blindsight, to restore motor function and vision for patients with conditions like ALS and total blindness. The company has implanted its devices in over 20 human participants and reports successful trials where users regained computer control or visual perception, supported by a strategy of vertical integration and an "all-green light" engineering framework. Founder J.D. McGuire envisions these medical breakthroughs as a precursor to creating an "exocortex" that merges human intent with AI, pending regulatory approval for broader non-medical augmentation.
- Sequoia Capital11 min
AI That Designs Its Own Chips: Ricursive's Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini
Anna Goldie, Azalia Mirhoseini
Founded by former leaders from Google Brain, Anthropic, and DeepMind, Recursive Intelligence has deployed its AlphaChip technology to optimize billions of transistors for Google's TPU and Axion lines while adopting by MediaTek. The company currently accelerates chip design by running static timing analysis 1,000 times faster than commercial tools, enabling AI agents to generate curved, organic layouts that reduce wire lengths and cut annual design cycles from months to days. Looking ahead, Recursive plans to democratize custom silicon through a platform model that delivers fabrication-ready layouts without in-house teams, ultimately aiming to vertically integrate design and fabrication into a self-reinforcing loop for frontier AI systems.
- Sequoia Capital40 min
Why IDEs Won't Die in the Age of AI Coding: Zed Founder Nathan Sobo
Nathan Sobo, Sonya Huang, Pat Grady
Nathan Sobo, founder of the Rust-based IDE Zed, argues against the impending obsolescence of visual editors by asserting that source code requires human-readable contexts for effective AI-driven code review. He introduces the open Agent Client Protocol to standardize interactions between diverse AI agents and Zed, aiming to replace ephemeral chat windows with a unified interface where conversations permanently anchor to specific code lines. With 170,000 active users, the platform prioritizes high-performance, real-time collaboration to support "vibe coding" workflows while maintaining critical human oversight for complex architectural decisions.
- Sequoia Capital7 min
Open Evidence Captures Doctors’ Collective Wisdom with AI ft. Zachary Ziegler
OpenEvidence, a medical search tool used daily by over 25% of US physicians, recently enabled an internal medicine doctor to successfully manage an in-flight emergency for an immunocompromised cancer patient without diverting the aircraft. By synthesizing current literature and CDC data, the platform confirmed the patient did not require immediate intervention and provided a targeted treatment protocol that ensured a positive outcome upon landing. Building on this high-volume, real-time performance, the company is now expanding into direct workflow integration and developing an Aggregate Clinical Wisdom initiative to encode expert consensus from top specialists across various fields.
- Sequoia Capital9 min
How OpenAI Built its Groundbreaking Deep Research Product ft. Isa Fulford
OpenAI's Deep Research introduces an agentic o3 model capable of executing complex, multi-step online investigations over five to thirty minutes to generate analyst-level reports. Targeted at professionals like venture capitalists and academics, the system synthesizes cross-lingual data through interactive clarifications and real-time transparency into its reasoning process. While current versions prioritize read-only browsing and citation granularity, the roadmap outlines plans to integrate these tools into broader reasoning models and enable autonomous action-taking based on findings.
- Sequoia Capital33 min
OpenAI’s Deep Research Team on Why Reinforcement Learning is the Future for AI Agents
Isa Fulford, Josh Tobin, Sonya Huang, Lauren Reeder
Launched three weeks ago, OpenAI's Deep Research is an agentic system powered by a fine-tuned O3 model that executes complex, multi-hour tasks like market analysis and medical research in 5 to 30 minutes. Utilizing reinforcement learning to optimize browsing and coding strategies, the tool distinguishes itself through a pre-research clarification flow that refines user prompts for higher-quality synthesis. As part of a broader 2025 shift toward agent-driven workflows, this technology aims to amplify knowledge workers by automating information-intensive processes previously deemed too time-consuming.
- Sequoia Capital45 min
OpenAI's Noam Brown, Ilge Akkaya and Hunter Lightman on o1 and Teaching LLMs to Reason Better
Noam Brown, Ilge Akkaya, Hunter Lightman, Sonya Huang, Pat Grady
OpenAI's O1 model, internally codenamed Project Strawberry, introduces a paradigm shift by employing "inference time compute" to enable systems to engage in extended, self-correcting reasoning processes akin to human System 2 thinking. This architecture has delivered unprecedented capabilities in STEM domains, allowing the AI to solve complex Olympiad-level programming problems, pass research engineer interviews, and assist in scientific discovery by bridging the gap between difficulty in generation versus verification. While the project faces limitations in speed and creative tasks compared to predecessors like GPT-4, its demonstrated ability to scale performance through increased thinking time marks a significant advancement toward the operational goal of Artificial General Intelligence.
- Sequoia Capital7 min
AI-augmented game development with Inworld co-founder Kylan Gibbs
Kylan In-World has launched a vertically integrated platform combining a local execution runtime engine with an AI studio to resolve the industry tension between technical performance and creative control in game development. Backed by strategic partnerships with NVIDIA, Microsoft Studios, and Ubisoft, the system powers dynamic narratives by processing multi-modal inputs in parallel to generate real-time quests, adjust environmental states, and modify mission objectives based on player dialogue. By prioritizing local latency reduction over cloud-based models, the technology enables non-scripted interactions where emotional states and relationship dynamics evolve in the backend to directly influence gameplay mechanics.
- Sequoia Capital11 min
AI-powered workflow automation with Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop
Zapier is launching Zapier Central, a new platform that replaces its traditional workflow canvas with natural language "AI Bots" capable of executing over 500,000 autonomous actions. These self-healing agents utilize zero-shot inference to automatically configure triggers, resolve parameters, and repair broken steps when external variables shift without manual intervention. The system now supports all 7,000 existing integrations while allowing users to refine bot behavior through direct feedback and a threading feature for step-level approval.