Safety
OWN YOUR INTELLIGENCE Last year, building on open-weight models was primarily a cost rationalization exercise. Slightly worse performance fo…
OWN YOUR INTELLIGENCE Last year, building on open-weight models was primarily a cost rationalization exercise. Slightly worse performance for a much cheaper price. Now, it is increasingly an existenti
OWN YOUR INTELLIGENCE Last year, building on open-weight models was primarily a cost rationalization exercise. Slightly worse performance for a much cheaper price. Now, it is increasingly an existential and strategic topic for our portfolio. Intelligence is the product. Companies want to shape it and own it and let it compound within their own walls. Not your weights, not your product. Now, with frontier open-weight models and fantastic tooling/infrastructure, owning your intelligence at the frontier is finally becoming possible. The result: every application company we work with is embarking on the journey of doing their own research on post-training, evals, harnesses, etc. The hottest neolabs may just be @Harvey, @FactoryAI, @Ramp, etc. The list goes on. We held a summit @sequoia to convene our portfolio on this topic, together with @gabepereyra (@Harvey) on building Harvey Labs, @lqiao (@FireworksAI_HQ) on post-training, @hwchase17 (@LangChain) on harnesses + evals, @BrendanFoody (@mercor_ai) on RL environments and synthetic data, @QuantumArjun (@trajectorylabs) on online continual learning. Opening talk below; rest to come this week! 00:00 What is sovereign AI (and what it isn't) 01:24 Centralized vs. decentralized intelligence 02:54 Four reasons companies own their models: cost, speed, performance, destiny 04:22 "Not your weights, not your product" 05:32 The application companies are the newest neo labs 07:05 Step 1: Deciding what to own vs. rent 09:51 Step 2: Build the team (and don't shoehorn your platform team) 11:17 Step 3: Legibility – why your research has to be visible 12:33 Step 4: The technical roadmap 13:56 The stack: production vs. development 15:16 Opening Pandora's box – base models, harnesses, context Media
Related
- Who Built This Model? Tracing LLM Lineage via Spectral Fingerprints in Weight Space
- From @sequoia's own your intelligence event. We're starting to see a new category of company emerge, the Full-Stack AI company, where innova…
- Open weight models will ensure that the entire world benefits from AI growth, and that America does not get left behind
Source: Sonya Huang (X) | 2026-08-11