Last week we hosted our 3rd annual @sequoia AI Ascent, bringing together 150+ of the top founders and researchers in AI.

Our star-studded speakers dropped hot takes and sparked inspiration for a standing-room-only audience:

- jensen huang on token-generating AI factories as the new industrial infrastructure
- @sama on the timeline to agents/science/robots and ChatGPT as Operating System
- @JeffDean on how he's been trying vibes coding and his prediction on the timeline to an AI junior engineer (sooner than you might think!)
- @btaylor on becoming Facebook CTO at age 29, pricing/packaging agents, and advice for application layer founders
- @DrJimFan of NVIDIA on why simulation is the key to robots passing the physical Turing test
- @ChaseLochmiller of Crusoe on the moving industrial bottlenecks to scaling AI: power, steel, real estate
- @mikeyk of Anthropic on MCP, Claude Code, and on his framework for product-building when the models themselves are changing so quickly
- @hwchase17 of Langchain on ambient agents and his vision for an "agent inbox"
- @danintheory of OpenAI on how RL is going from the "cherry on top" of the pre-training cake to the main course, and what questions einstein-v1907-super-high might be able to answer by scaling reasoning compute
- @gradypb on the new physics of distribution, the Leone merchandising cycle applied to AI foundation models vs application startups, and his advice to startups to "run like heck"
- @Konstantine on the agent economy and stochastic mindset
And many more.

Thanks to our community for making this the best, most buzzy, content-rich AI Ascent yet 💚 Detailed session recaps to follow -- and replay videos dropping over the course of the week.


Jensen Huang of @nvidia:
* AI is the industry of the future. We're manufacturing tokens, not sneakers. AI Factories are the new industrial infrastructure.
* We’re moving from "servers retrieving data" to "AI factories generating tokens" as the new economic engine.
* Preserving and nurturing the open source ecosystem is key to pressing America's competitive advantage and innovation cycle in AI.
* AI Security will become an increasingly hot topic as agents take off

Introducing the @sequoia Gen AI Market Map!🌎 We’ve decided to map out this emerging frontier, thanks to all the contributions and feedback we’ve received.

This space is moving quickly – this map is a living document, so keep the suggestions coming! Who else should we include? Here are some of the projects that get us excited: