Sequoia Capital

The question Ineffable Intelligence’s David Silver hears most about reinforcement learning: how do you specify a reward for something as complicated as "science" or "interesting maths"? His answer is that you don't. You give the agent something simple to optimize inside a world with a lot to learn about. Nature works this way. Evolution optimizes a simple fitness signal and produces all the complexity of life. Humans pursued simple goals and ended up with everything we know. The chain he describes: pursuing our goals, we started coordinating. Coordinating led to communicating. Communicating led to trading. Trading made arithmetic useful, then tools, then the science to understand the tools, then more complex technology, then more complex maths. Nobody specified any of it. Get that process right and it takes off.

Beam is yours to build on. Open weights, Apache 2.0. Alongside Mirror CLI, the harness Reflection built and trained it on. Proud of this team. Let’s build! 🇺🇸

“If a large company wants to kill you, they will kill you. But you know what? They’re distracted.” Alfred Lin sat down with the Stanford AI Club to share what he’s learned backing founders from idea to IPO, and why two people and an idea shouldn’t worry about defensibility yet.

Alfred Lin has backed Airbnb, DoorDash, Kalshi, and Zipline. His take on AI: the biggest megatrend of his career, and it will still diffuse slower than it looks. We kicked off the Stanford AI Club 2026–27 Speaker Series with Alfred (Sequoia Capital). A few ideas from the conversation that stuck with us: → The diffusion gap. Amazon didn't kill Walmart. Even transformative tech takes years to reshape incumbents. → Value is accruing in the application layer, and owning your own intelligence matters. → Stop thinking in terms of selling tools. The more ambitious move is becoming the service. → "Fire and ice": great companies need passion and discipline at the same time (lessons from Zappos and Amazon). → For students: optimize for learning and great people. He also covered circular money in AI, how to tell a feature from an enduring company (the Airbnb story), and how to spend your first 90 days as a student founder. The link to the full talk is below👇 https://lnkd.in/gZTXeD-s Which of these would you push back on? Thank you to Alfred and Sequoia Capital. Facilitated by Tanvir Bhathal + Jason Zhang. #AI #Startups #VentureCapital

We’ve been working on a hard problem, and I'm privileged to share that Abby Care has raised $82M to transform the future of care at home. We’re welcoming new healthcare partners led by Transformation Capital, along with CVS Health Ventures, Frist Cressey Ventures, and Pivotal, with participation from our existing, early partners Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Sequoia Capital. The problem frustrates me daily. We’re living through one of the largest healthcare workforce shortages, a rapidly aging population, and waitlists of vulnerable children needing care. Clinicians can’t see what’s happening in the home, so changes in health go unnoticed until they become emergencies. All of this strains a reactive health system and drives up costs. Family caregivers already know their loved ones best and are in the home. They’re the first to notice when something isn’t right. At Abby, we equip family caregivers with training, AI, and support from our clinicians to deliver quality care. Our platform enables real-time capture of care data in the home. Health plans and states deserve visibility and confidence that care is delivered as intended. Better care and program integrity go together. So far, we’ve helped families deliver millions of hours of care across many states, our members had 40%+ fewer reported hospitalizations in year one. But we’re just getting started, and there’s a lot more work ahead to deliver value for families and health plans. When I started, many people asked why build such a hard business in a space this complex. We did it anyway, because for the 60 million family caregivers waiting for care, it’s a fight worth fighting. Building this company has been a character-defining experience. It takes intense pain tolerance to keep getting up after being knocked down again and again. So to our team, partners, and the families who we’ve built this mission with, the credit goes to you. We have the opportunity to build a new family-led care system and to be stewards of public dollars. This team is not going to stop until we build it. The future of healthcare starts at home. Read more about our next chapter and our feature in Fortune here: https://lnkd.in/g92dE89F Back to work 🏗️ 🚀 Alfred Lin Josephine Chen Vinod Khosla Alexander A. Morgan, MD PhD Nworah Ayogu Michael Dixon Jenna Ciotti Layla Behrouzian Justin Brock Andrea Messina Payal Parikh Camille Wiggins Bill Frist, M.D. Mark Tipps Olivia Capra, CFA Erin Harkless Moore, CFA Renata Aráuz-DeStefano

David Silver founded Ineffable Intelligence with a mission to build a "super learner" and make first contact with superintelligence. He says a super learner has capacity in two dimensions. Depth: it starts from knowing nothing at all and goes all the way to discovering things beyond what humans know. Breadth: you can drop it into any stream of experience and it keeps learning. His analogy is us. Humans started with gray mush and discovered languages, technology, science and mathematics for ourselves. Nobody handed us a blueprint or a dataset. No AI system has done that yet.

Bending Spoons is up +40% today on the news Berkshire Hathaway is acquiring a 4% stake. On our recent Long Strange Trip podcast, founder and CEO Luca Ferrari told Brian Halligan that the difference between Bending Spoons and Berkshire is: “we buy and hold forever.” Link to the full conversation in the comments  ↓