Neil Movva - Making AI 10x Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.488]
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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 positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is Neil Moba, 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, and 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 done through the full stack of intelligence, the software, the
Sale 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.
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.
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.
So if you think about the theme of the day being token costs, is token cost the right way to think about this? Is there some other way you'd put it?
To start with, absolutely, token cost. Today, my North Star is I wanna have the lowest cost per token in the industry and do that by a mile. I don't think tokens are the final unit of work or intelligence, but they are what we use today. After tokens, you start to move more towards more outcomes, which is like a vague direction. You can imagine, for example, today when you consume tokens through an agent, you don't actually control how many tokens the agent reasons for. It can reason for a certain amount of time or it can call a certain number of tools. And increasingly, think we will have age
Why is there an opportunity that you can ta
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