Training Data

Sequoia Capital
Training Data

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.

  1. 2 DAYS AGO

    ReflectionAI Founder Ioannis Antonoglou: From AlphaGo to AGI

    Ioannis Antonoglou, founding engineer at DeepMind and co-founder of ReflectionAI, has seen the triumphs of reinforcement learning firsthand. From AlphaGo to AlphaZero and MuZero, Ioannis has built the most powerful agents in the world. Ioannis breaks down key moments in AlphaGo's game against Lee Sodol (Moves 37 and 78), the importance of self-play and the impact of scale, reliability, planning and in-context learning as core factors that will unlock the next level of progress in AI. Hosted by: Stephanie Zhan and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital Mentioned in this episode: PPO: Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm developed by DeepMind in game environments. Also used by OpenAI for RLHF in ChatGPT. MuJoCo: Open source physics engine used to develop PPO Monte Carlo Tree Search: Heuristic search algorithm used in AlphaGo as well as video compression for YouTube and the self-driving system at Tesla AlphaZero: The DeepMind model that taught itself from scratch how to master the games of chess, shogi and Go MuZero: The DeepMind follow up to AlphaZero that mastered games without knowing the rules and able to plan winning strategies in unknown environments AlphaChem: Chemical Synthesis Planning with Tree Search and Deep Neural Network Policies DQN: Deep Q-Network, Introduced in 2013 paper, Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning AlphaFold: DeepMind model for predicting protein structures for which Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and David Baker won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

    52 min
  2. Kumo’s Hema Raghavan: Turning Graph AI into ROI

    21 JAN

    Kumo’s Hema Raghavan: Turning Graph AI into ROI

    Hema Raghavan is co-founder of Kumo, a company that makes graph neural networks accessible to enterprises by connecting to their relational data stored in Snowflake and Databricks. Hema talks about how running GNNs on GPUs has led to breakthroughs in performance as well as the query language Kumo developed to help companies predict future data points. Although approachable for non-technical users, the product provides full control for data scientists who use Kumo to automate time-consuming feature engineering pipelines. Mentioned in this episode: Graph Neural Networks: Learning mechanism for data in graph format, the basis of the Kumo product Graph RAG: Popular extension of retrieval-augmented generation using GNNs LiGNN: Graph Neural Networks at LinkedIn paper  KDD: Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference Hosted by: Konstantine Buhler and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital

    52 min

  3. 14 JAN

    Databricks Founder Ion Stoica: Turning Academic Open Source into Startup Success

    Berkeley professor Ion Stoica, co-founder of Databricks and Anyscale, transformed the open source projects Spark and Ray into successful AI infrastructure companies. He talks about what mattered most for Databricks' success -- the focus on making Spark win and making Databricks the best place to run Spark. He highlights the importance of striking key partnerships -- the Microsoft partnership in particular that accelerated Databricks' growth and contributed to Spark's dominance among data scientists and AI engineers. He also shares his perspective on finding new problems to work on, which holds lessons for aspiring founders and builders: 1) building systems in new areas that, if widely adopted, put you in the best position to understand the new problem space, and 2) focusing on a problem that is more important tomorrow than today. Hosted by: Stephanie Zhan and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital Mentioned in this episode:  Spark: The open source platform for data engineering that Databricks was originally based on. Ray: Open source framework to manage, executes and optimizes compute needs across AI workloads, now productized through Anyscale MosaicML: Generative AI startups founded by Naveen Rao that Databricks acquired in 2023. Unity Catalog: Data and AI governance solution from Databricks. CIB Berkeley: Multi-strategy hedge fund at UC Berkeley that commercializes research in the UC system. Hadoop: A long-time leading platform for large scale distributed computing. VLLM and Chatbot Arena: Two of Ion’s students’ projects that he wanted to highlight.

    1 hr
  4. XBOW CEO and GitHub Copilot Creator Oege de Moor: Cracking the Code on Offensive Security With AI

    10/12/2024

    XBOW CEO and GitHub Copilot Creator Oege de Moor: Cracking the Code on Offensive Security With AI

    Oege de Moor, the creator of GitHub Copilot, discusses how XBOW’s AI offensive security system matches and even outperforms top human penetration testers, completing security assessments in minutes instead of days. The team’s speed and focus is transforming the niche market of pen testing with an always-on service-as-a-software platform. Oege describes how he is building a large and sustainable business while also creating a product that will “protect all the software in the free world.” XBOW shows how AI is essential for protecting software systems as the amount of AI-generated code increases along with the scale and sophistication of cyber threats. Hosted by: Konstantine Buhler and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital Mentioned in this episode:  Semmle: Oege’s previous startup, a code analysis tool to secure software, acquired in 2019 by GitHub Nico Waisman: Head of security at XBOW, previously a researcher at Semmle The Bitter Lesson: Highly influential post by Richard Sutton HackerOne: Cybersecurity company that runs one of the largest bug bounty programs Suno: AI songwriting app that Oege loves Machines of Loving Grace: Essay by Anthropic founder, Dario Amodei

    52 min
  5. Ramp CEO Eric Glyman: Using AI to Build “Self-Driving Money”

    03/12/2024

    Ramp CEO Eric Glyman: Using AI to Build “Self-Driving Money”

    When ChatGPT ushered in a new paradigm of AI in everyday use, many companies attempted to adapt to the new paradigm by rushing to add chat interfaces to their products. Eric has a different take—he doesn’t think chatbots are the right form factor for everything. He thinks “zero-touch” automation that works invisibly in the background can be more valuable in many cases. He cites self-driving cars as an analogy—or in this case, “self-driving money.” Ramp is a new kind of finance management company for businesses, offering AI-powered financial tools to help companies handle spending and expense processes. We’ll hear why Eric thinks AI that you never see is one of the most powerful instruments for reducing time spent on drudgery and unlocking more time for meaningful work.   Hosted by: Ravi Gupta and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital Mentioned in this episode: Paribus: Glyman’s previous company, acquired by Capital One in 2016 Karim Atiyeh: Cofounder and CTO at Ramp and Glyman’s cofounder at Paribus Devin: AI agent product from Cognition Labs and Glyman’s favorite AI app Hit Refresh: Book by Satya Nadella

    39 min
  6. Dust’s Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu: Getting the Most From AI With Multiple Custom Agents

    26/11/2024

    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

    1h 3m
  7. Clay’s Kareem Amin on Building the Sales ‘System of Action’ with AI

    19/11/2024

    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

    52 min
  8. Decart’s Dean Leitersdorf on AI-Generated Video Games and Worlds

    13/11/2024

    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

    47 min
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Ratings & Reviews

4.8
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

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.

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