How Companies Are Building Their Own Intelligence | Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital partner Sonya Huang opens our Own Your Intelligence event with the case for why more companies are choosing to own their intelligence, down to the weights. She lays out the four forces driving the shift: cost, speed, performance, and controlling your own destiny, and explains why the race for the application layer is becoming the race for the intelligence layer itself. Sonya shares an opinionated framework for deciding what to own vs. rent when assembling your AI stack, and another for how to get going from zero to one. With today's open-weight models near the frontier, she argues, owning your stack is no longer a performance sacrifice. It may be your performance edge. 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