How Google’s Nano Banana Achieved Breakthrough Character Consistency
When Google launched Nano Banana, it instantly became a global phenomenon, introducing an image model that finally made it possible for people to see themselves in AI-generated worlds. In this episode, Nicole Brichtova and Hansa Srinivasan, the product and engineering leads behind Nano Banana, share the story behind the model’s creation and what it means for the future of visual AI.
Nicole and Hansa discuss how they achieved breakthrough character consistency, why human evaluation remains critical for models that aim to feel right, and how “fun” became a gateway to utility. They explain the craft behind Gemini’s multimodal design, the obsession with data quality that powered Nano Banana’s realism, and how user creativity continues to push the technology in unexpected directions—from personal storytelling to education and professional design. The conversation explores what comes next in visual AI, why accessibility and imagination must evolve together, and how the tools we build can help people capture not just reality but possibility.
Hosted by: Stephanie Zhan and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital
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OpenAI Sora 2 Team: How Generative Video Will Unlock Creativity and World Models
The OpenAI Sora 2 team (Bill Peebles, Thomas Dimson, Rohan Sahai) discuss how they compressed filmmaking from months to days, enabling anyone to create compelling video. Bill, who invented the diffusion transformer that powers Sora and most video generation models, explains how space-time tokens enable object permanence and physics understanding in AI-generated video, and why Sora 2 represents a leap for video. Thomas and Rohan share how they're intentionally designing the Sora product against mindless scrolling, optimizing for creative inspiration, and building the infrastructure for IP holders to participate in a new creator economy. The conversation goes beyond video generation into the team’s vision for world simulators that could one day run scientific experiments, their perspective on co-evolving society alongside technology, and how digital simulations in alternate realities may become the future of knowledge work.
Hosted by: Konstantine Buhler and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital
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Nvidia CTO Michael Kagan: Scaling Beyond Moore's Law to Million-GPU Clusters
Recorded live at Sequoia’s Europe100 event: Michael Kagan, co-founder of Mellanox and CTO of Nvidia, explains how the $7 billion Mellanox acquisition helped transform Nvidia from a chip company into the architect of AI infrastructure. Kagan breaks down the technical challenges of scaling from single GPUs to 100K and eventually million-GPU data centers. He reveals why network performance—not just compute power—determines AI system efficiency. He discusses the shift from training to inference workloads, and his vision for AI as humanity's "spaceship of the mind," and why he thinks AI may help us discover laws of physics we haven’t yet imagined.
Hosted by Sonya Huang and Pat Grady
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Securing the AI Frontier: Irregular Co-founder Dan Lahav
Irregular co-founder Dan Lahav is redefining what cybersecurity means in the age of autonomous AI. Working closely with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, Dan, co-founder Omer Nevo and team are pioneering “frontier AI security”—a proactive approach to safeguarding systems where AI models act as independent agents.
Dan shares how emergent behaviors, from models socially engineering each other to outmaneuvering real-world defenses like Windows Defender, signal a coming paradigm shift. Dan explains why tomorrow’s threats will come from AI-on-AI interactions, why anomaly detection will soon break down, and how governments and enterprises alike must rethink defenses from first principles as AI becomes a national security layer.
Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Dean Meyer, Sequoia Capital
00:00 Introduction
03:07 The Future of AI Security
03:55 Thought Experiment: Security in the Age of GPT-10
05:23 Economic Shifts and AI Interaction
07:13 Security in the Autonomous Age
08:50 AI Model Capabilities and Cybersecurity
11:08 Real-World AI Security Simulations
12:31 Working with AI Labs
32:34 Enterprise AI Security Strategies
40:03 Governmental AI Security Considerations
43:41 Final Thoughts
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Why AI Will Transform Customer Experience: Cresta CEO Ping Wu and Sequoia’s Doug Leone
Ping Wu built Google's contact center business before becoming CEO of Cresta, where he's pioneering a unique approach to contact center transformation. Rather than full automation Ping advocates a dual approach, automating what's ready while using AI to assist humans with the rest. He makes the case for an abundance mindset—imagining new customer experiences like talking to airline apps or turning synchronous interactions asynchronous. Ping breaks down the technical challenges of deploying Contact Center AI at scale, from solving latency to orchestrating 20+ models in real-time. Sequoia’s Doug Leone shares his framework for building AI companies at speed and why he believes we're at the front end of an Industrial Revolution 2.0.
Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Doug Leone, Sequoia Capital
00:00 Introduction
01:13 The Evolution of Contact Centers
02:05 Debating AI's Impact on Call Centers
04:07 Challenges and Opportunities in Contact Centers
08:14 Technological Waves in Contact Centers
11:10 AI vs Human Agents: The Future
13:35 Customer Experience and AI
16:33 The Role of Data in AI Automation
19:05 Competing in the AI Space
22:34 Building a Company in the AI Era
24:05 Instilling Speed in AI Companies
24:53 Management Experience and Growth Challenges
26:01 Identifying Leadership Potential
26:37 Cresta's Leadership Transition
28:34 Future Goals for Cresta
29:56 AI Market Cycles and Investment
35:38 Cresta's Technical Stack
45:11 AI's Impact on Business Communication
Join us as we train our neural nets on the theme of the century: AI. Sonya Huang, Pat Grady and more Sequoia Capital partners host conversations with leading AI builders and researchers to ask critical questions and develop a deeper understanding of the evolving technologies—and their implications for technology, business and society.
The content of this podcast does not constitute investment advice, an offer to provide investment advisory services, or an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund.
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