This is AGI: Sequoia AI Ascent 2026 Keynote

By Sequoia Capital

Categories: VC, Startup

Summary

We've crossed into AGI—not through philosophical debate, but through practical capability: agents that recover from failures and persist until tasks complete. The AI wave is fundamentally different from past tech shifts because it's a revolution in computation (not communication), moving at unprecedented speed with a $10 trillion addressable services market emerging alongside traditional software.

Key Takeaways

1. AI is the first tech wave that's both software AND services. Cloud software grew TAM from $350B to $650B, but legal services alone in the US is a $400B market—one vertical, one geography. The services opportunity could be 5-50 trillion dollars.
2. Three major discontinuous inflection points in 24 months: ChatGPT (pre-training power), o1 (inference-time scaling laws), Claude 3.5/Sonos (long-horizon agents). The jump from reasoning models to persistent agents represents a hard break—functionally AGI.
3. AI is a revolution in computation, not communication. Past waves (internet, cloud, mobile) were about information distribution. AI changes how information is processed—meaning the technology foundation shifts daily as new capabilities emerge. The floor keeps moving underfoot.
4. We're moving from 'faster horses' (10-40% productivity gains) to 'cars' (10-40x productivity gains that reshape work itself). These applications fundamentally change how you work, your role, and your organization's structure—not just speed.
5. Practical AGI definition from a founder/business perspective: agents that can be dispatched to complete jobs, recover from failures, and persist until completion. This functional threshold matters more than philosophical definitions for building companies.

Topics

• Long-Horizon Agents
• Inference-Time Compute Scaling
• AI Services Markets
• Computation vs Communication Waves
• 10x Productivity Applications

Transcript Excerpt

Good morning. How's everybody doing? >> All right. All right. A little bit better. Hey, thank you all for being here. We really appreciate it. We do this as a service to the community because we are living through important times and it's an honor for us to be able to serve as a bit of a gathering place for people to come together. And this is by far the best agenda we put together and by far the best set of attendees. And so we just want to start out by saying thank you. We know you all crazy b...