The Breakthroughs Needed for AGI Have Already Been Made: OpenAI Former Research Head Bob McGrew
As OpenAI's former Head of Research, Bob McGrew witnessed the company's evolution from GPT-3’s breakthrough to today's reasoning models. He argues that there are three legs of the stool for AGI—Transformers, scaled pre-training, and reasoning—and that the fundamentals that will shape the next decade-plus are already in place. He thinks 2025 will be defined by reasoning while pre-training hits diminishing returns. Bob discusses why the agent economy will price services at compute costs due to near-infinite supply, fundamentally disrupting industries like law and medicine, and how his children use ChatGPT to spark curiosity and agency. From robotics breakthroughs to managing brilliant researchers, Bob offers a unique perspective on AI’s trajectory and where startups can still find defensible opportunities.
Hosted by: Stephanie Zhan and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital
Mentioned in this episode:
Solving Rubik’s Cube with a robot hand: OpenAI’s original robotics research
Computer Use and Operator: Anthropic and OpenAI reasoning breakthroughs that originated with OpenAi researchers
Skild and Physical Intelligence: Robotics-oriented companies Bob sees as well-positioned now
Distyl: AI company founded by ex-Palintir alums to create enterprise workflows driven by proprietary data
Member of the technical staff: Title at OpenAI designed to break down barriers between AI researchers and engineers
Howie.ai: Scheduling app that Bob uses
Training Data
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.
- No. of episodes: 53
- Latest episode: 2025-06-24
- Business Technology
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