AI Ascent 2026
AI Ascent IV was our biggest and best year yet.
On April 20, we hosted our fourth annual AI Ascent in San Francisco, bringing together more than 150 leading founders and researchers in AI, including Demis Hassabis, Andrej Karpathy, Greg Brockman, Boris Cherny of Anthropic, Dmitri Dolgov of Waymo, Jim Fan of Nvidia, and many more.
Sequoia partner Pat Grady opened the day with a frame for the moment: AI is a revolution in computation. Not faster horses, but cars. And the cars have arrived. His advice for founders building on top of the labs: get MAD. Build moats from the customer back, design for affordance, and exploit the diffusion gap between the model capabilities and what the Fortune 500 has deployed. Sonya Huang declared 2026 the year of agents, and walked through the three ingredients (models, tools, and harnesses) that have finally come together. Konstantine Buhler argued that the cognitive revolution will follow the same arc as the Industrial Revolution—just bigger and faster—and that AI is about to do to cognitive work what the Industrial Revolution did to manual labor.
The talks ranged from the long-horizon agent revolution and the endgame for robotics, to data centers in space, the frontier of data efficiency, and the emerging science behind neural networks.
Below is a selection of videos from the event. For the full lineup, visit our YouTube playlist.