Sequoia Capital's AI Ascent 2026 convened Greg Brockman, Andrej Karpathy, Demis Hassabis, Boris Cherny, Dmitri Dolgov, and more with 150+ leading founders and researchers to discuss the present and future of AI.
LLMs enable new primitives: apps fully engulfed by LLMs, "install .md, not .sh", knowledge systems over arbitrary unstructured data.
LLM jaggedness: a model can refactor a 100k-line codebase and still fail basic tasks — increasingly it’s about both verifiability and economics: frontier labs heavily optimize domains with strong reward signals and large TAMs.
The agent-native economy: products decomposing into sensors, actuators, and logic; systems designed to be maximally legible to LLMs; and the rise of agentic engineering as a new discipline.