Neil Movva - Making AI 10x Cheaper

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at colossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:52)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:19)
My guest today is Neil Movva, the founder of SAIL Research. SAIL is building what Neil calls a token factory, an inference company designed for a specific kind of future, one where AI agents run in the background for hours or days at a time, rather than answering a human in real time. In that world, latency matters less and cost matters much more. Neil has built the entire company around driving the cost of a token as low as it can possibly go.
What makes this conversation special is it is one of the most detailed tours I've ever run through the full stack of intelligence, the software, the chips, the power, and how the three connect. Along the way, we cover the trade-off between speed and cost that lives inside of every GPU, his scavenger strategy for buying the chips and power no one else wants, his contrarian view on Nvidia, and why the premium the Frontier Labs charge for being three to six months ahead may not last. Please enjoy my conversation with Neil Movva.
I think it's important early in these conversations to just say the thing, literally what you're building and what it does today. Maybe just orient us there with a brief description, like literally what the system is that you're building and why it should exist.

**Neil Movva** (3:21)
Sail Research is a Token Factory. We have an API where anyone can send us requests, where they can use large language models, open source large language models for any task they want. We will serve those tokens to them at a price that is unbeatable in the market. We also support their ability to build agents on top of this. We host what we call Sailboxes, which are long-running agent virtual machines hosted in the cloud that are designed for agents that run for hours, days or weeks.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:45)
So I should think about you as a peer company to others that serve different kinds of inference. You're serving one specific kind of inference. And your goal is to be the absolute cheapest provider and enabler of a certain kind of use of intelligence.

**Neil Movva** (3:58)
Exactly. The theme of our company is abundance. We want to deliver this new commodity of intelligence to as many people as possible at a cost that is sustainable for almost every industry. We think that whenever you make something 10 times cheaper, it's a new product category. We aspire to do that for tokens. We think it's so profound that the machine can think, and now our job is to make as many machines as possible in the world work towards thinking.