Training Data

Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, joins Sequoia partner Andrew Reed at AI Ascent 2026 to talk about how a four-year-old company built a frontier audio AI business with just over 400 people and over $400M in revenue. He explains why audio was overlooked in 2022 when the rest of AI was chasing text and images, why ElevenLabs chose to monetize from day one rather than raise indefinitely, and why he believes voice will be the primary interface for agents, robots, and the next generation of computing. Also: why emotional intelligence is the next frontier in voice, and what happens when one voice agent realizes it's talking to another.

Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, joins Sequoia partner Lauren Reeder at AI Ascent 2026 to talk about where coding goes from here. He explains why he hasn't written a line of code in 2026, why he now ships dozens of PRs a day from his phone, and why he believes coding is effectively solved — at least for the code he writes. Also: why loops are the future, why he thinks Claude Code itself may be 100 lines of code a year from now, and why the invention of the printing press is the right analogy for what's about to happen to software.

Dmitri Dolgov, co-CEO of Waymo, joins Sequoia partner Konstantine Buhler at AI Ascent 2026 to talk about the 20-year arc from the DARPA Grand Challenge to fully autonomous service in eleven cities and counting. He explains how Waymo persisted through every AV hype cycle by treating safety as the non-negotiable foundation, why exponential scaling is finally here (10 of Waymo's 20 million autonomous rides have happened in the last seven months), and how the Waymo Foundation Model — a multimodal world action model that powers the driver, the simulator, and the critic — actually works under the hood. Also: why Waymo is now 13x safer than human drivers, and the moment a Waymo detected a pedestrian behind a city bus by reading the LiDAR returns of their feet.

Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, joins Sequoia partner Alfred Lin at AI Ascent 2026 for a conversation that spans the full OpenAI stack. He explains why the company will never have enough compute, why he believes we're 80% of the way to AGI, and why the agentic coding tools that wrote 20% of your code last December are now writing 80% of it. Also: why human attention is becoming the scarcest resource in AI-augmented work, and what it might be like to one day run an organization of 100,000 agents.

Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and 2024 Nobel laureate in chemistry for AlphaFold, joins Sequoia partner Konstantine Buhler at AI Ascent 2026 for a wide-ranging conversation about the path to AGI and what comes after. He explains why he believes AGI is achievable by 2030, why drug discovery could collapse from ten years to days, and why we should think of information, not matter or energy, as the most fundamental substance in the universe. Also: what Einstein would tell us about the limits of today's models, and why the next year or two will be critical for humanity.