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...
Palo Alto Networks’s Nikesh Arora: AI, Security and the New World Order
Palo Alto Networks’s CEO Nikesh Arora dispels DeepSeek hype by detailing all of the guardrails enterprises need to have in place to give AI agents “arms and legs.” No matter the model, deploying applications for precision-use cases means superimposing better controls. Arora emphasizes that the real challenge isn’t just blocking threats but matching the accelerated pace of AI-powered attacks, requiring a fundamental shift from prevention-focused to real-time detection and response systems. CISOs are risk managers, but legacy companies competing with more risk-tolerant startups need to move quickly and embrace change.
Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital
Mentioned in this episode:
Cortex XSIAM: Security operations and incident remediation platform from Palo Alto Networks
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1:00:08
MongoDB’s Sahir Azam: Vector Databases and the Data Structure of AI
MongoDB product leader Sahir Azam explains how vector databases have evolved from semantic search to become the essential memory and state layer for AI applications. He describes his view of how AI is transforming software development generally, and how combining vectors, graphs and traditional data structures enables high-quality retrieval needed for mission-critical enterprise AI use cases. Drawing from MongoDB's successful cloud transformation, Azam shares his vision for democratizing AI development by making sophisticated capabilities accessible to mainstream developers through integrated tools and abstractions.
Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital
Mentioned in this episode:
Introducing ambient agents: Blog post by Langchain on a new UX pattern where AI agents can listen to an event stream and act on it
Google Gemini Deep Research: Sahir enjoys its amazing product experience
Perplexity: AI search app that Sahir admires for its product craft
Snipd: AI powered podcast app Sahir likes
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44:26
Roblox Studio Head Stef Corazza: Using AI to Empower Creators
Stef Corazza leads generative AI development at Roblox after previously building Adobe’s 3D and AR platforms. His technical expertise, combined with Roblox’s unique relationship with its users, has led to the infusion of AI into its creation tools. Roblox has assembled the world’s largest multimodal dataset. Stef previews the Roblox Assistant and the company’s new 3D foundation model, while emphasizing the importance of maintaining positive experiences and civility on the platform.
Mentioned in this episode:
Driving Empire: A Roblox car racing game Stef particularly enjoys
RDC: Roblox Developer Conference
Ego.live: Roblox app to create and share synthetic worlds populated with human-like generative agents and simulated communities|
PINNs: Physics Informed Neural Networks
ControlNet: A model for controlling image diffusion by conditioning on an additional input image that Stef says can be used as a 2.5D approach to 3D generation.
Neural rendering: A combination of deep learning with computer graphics principles developed by Nvidia in its RTX platform
Hosted by: Konstantine Buhler and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital
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54:46
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
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52:29
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
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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