Gabriel Hubert

Gabriel Hubert is co-founder and CEO of Dust, which builds custom internal AI agents wired to a company's own data and tools. With co-founder Stanislas Polu, a former OpenAI researcher, he started Dust in early 2023, betting that one model would not rule them all, and that proprietary company data would unlock assistants people use at work.

Refusing GPUs Before Product-Market Fit

They refused to raise a frontier-model fortune before knowing which jobs customers needed done. On Sequoia's Training Data podcast Hubert recalled the internal slogan "No GPUs before PMF": explore use cases on existing models first. The product layer around the model, including access control, observability, connectors, and assistant design, mattered more than training another foundation model. Fine-tuning company data, they argued, was usually the wrong hammer; context control was the right one.

Leaving Calculator Certainty Behind

Hubert's cultural thesis is that workplaces must leave calculator certainty behind. On Training Data he said: "We've asked the entire world to move from calculator technology—punch the same keys, you'll get the same results—to stochastic technology—ask the same question, you'll get a slightly different result." He treats model output as a draft that saves time: "I'm not asking it to be right 100 percent of the time. I'm asking it to give me a draft that saves me time many, many, many times over."

Splitting Work Across Many Assistants at Dust

Dust makes it easy to specialize assistants such as sales-enablement helpers, support drafters, personal coaches and cross-functional translators. People, Hubert argues, already know a screwdriver from a hammer; they hate when a single bot answers like the wrong tool. Once a company hits critical mass of assistants, usage skyrockets beyond the original pilot use cases. A product motto he returns to is "Augmenting humans, not replacing them", a bet on tools that make the people who keep their jobs more capable.