On March 20, we hosted our second AI Ascent event in San Francisco, bringing together 100 leading founders and researchers in AI to discuss what partner Pat Grady calls, “the single greatest value creation opportunity mankind has ever known.” Partner Sonya Huang set the stage for how the promise of Generative AI to revolutionize industries and provide amazing productivity gains is starting to come into focus. And partner Konstantine Buhler looked ahead to how AI will infuse the companies of the future.

Over the course of the day we chatted with AI leaders including Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dylan Field of Figma, Alfred Mensch of Mistral, Daniela Amodei of Anthropic, Andrew Ng of AI Fund, CJ Desai of ServiceNow and (currently) independent researcher Andrej Karpathy. The talks ranged from the merits of large and small models, the rise of reasoning agents, the future of compute and the evolving AI ecosystem.

Below is a selection of highlights from the event (some sessions were off the record):

You can also watch the videos on the AI Ascent 2024 YouTube playlist.