Sarah Guo - What the 250 People Building AI Believe
September 1, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readSarah Guo - What the 250 People Building AI Believe
Sarah Guo, founder of Conviction, spends her days embedded with the researchers and entrepreneurs pushing AI's frontier. She estimates she knows about 250 of them personally—the people who "show up in the morning and push this whole thing forward." In conversation with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, she describes a field that is simultaneously exhilarating and disorienting, where the most important questions are not about technology alone but about psychology, capital allocation, and national competitiveness.
The Disempowerment of Frontier Researchers
One of the most striking dynamics Guo observes is a shift in how top AI researchers feel about their own work. A belief has crystallized over the last 12 months: that with recursive self-improvement—models that improve other models—the field is one or two years away from some form of exponential intelligence. But this belief, rather than energizing researchers, is creating a sense of irrelevance.
"The question of how do we get there is really up to every single person," Guo says. "Now, if the question is, well, I need $750 billion of compute spend, and we have many thousands of people working on this problem—I think people feel less ownership of the outcome."
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:23) **What It Feels Like Inside the AI Frenzy** - Sarah describes the current moment as frenzied and chaotic, comparing it to driving at 90 mph and wanting to hit the brakes without missing the opportunity.
- 2 (03:58) **The Wager on a Monolithic vs. Pluralistic AI Future** - Sarah rejects the idea of a "war" but clearly states she does not want a future where one to three frontier models consume the economy.
- 3 (06:20) **The Simple, Hard Recipe for Early-Stage Success** - Sarah attributes her firm's early success to a simple thesis: take the bet on understanding the technology from first principles when the competitive landscape was less crowded.
- 4 (09:03) **The Framework: Matching Technology to Workflow** - Sarah explains her decision-making framework using the investment in Harvey (AI for law) as the key example.
- 5 (11:05) **The 250 People Building AI: New Beliefs & Disempowerment** - Sarah reports on the mindset of the top researchers she talks to, noting a new belief in recursive self-improvement and exponential intelligence within 1-2 years.
- 6 (13:53) **The Unhealthy Constraints: Compute, Energy, and Regulation** - Sarah identifies the biggest inhibitors to the future she wants to see, focusing on the physical supply chain.
- 7 (15:56) **The Danger of Non-Fundamental Capital** - Sarah worries about the quality of decision-making in a capital-heavy environment, where investors proxy judgment for pedigree and legible signals.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
My guest today is Sarah Guo, founder and managing partner of Conviction, the venture firm she built to back AI-native companies from their earliest days.
Sarah has become one of the most sought-after early-stage investors in AI, often the first check into the companies defining the frontier.
In this conversation, we go inside that frontier: what the small group of people actually building AI believe right now, why some of the field's best researchers are wrestling with their own sense of purpose, and how close we are to robots in the home and a genuine acceleration in scientific discovery.
At the center is Sarah's conviction that no single company will own the future of AI, and what that means for founders, investors, and anyone allocating their time and resources in a world moving this fast.
Our managing editor Dom Cooke wrote a profile of Sarah for Colossus, "Sarah's Wager," on how she built the firm closest to the AI frontier and why she's now betting against its biggest companies.
Please enjoy this conversation with Sarah Guo.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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