Neil Movva (@neilmovva) started his career at Nvidia, working on GPUs and kernels, and has an unusually deep understanding of inference, from software to chips to power. We spend a lot of time on each of those layers, how they connect, and where the important tradeoffs are. What makes this conversation special is how detailed it is (like a 401-level class), yet Neil makes it remarkably clear and easy to follow. Today he runs Sail Research, a company building infrastructure for agents to make tokens as cheap as possible. We discuss: - Latency versus throughput - Why there are no bad chips, only bad pricing - The end of kernel engineering - Buying chips and power no one else wants - New chip architectures - Nvidia lore + his contrarian view of the company - Open source and the frontier labs I learned a ton. Enjoy! TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:38 Building a “Token Factory” 4:21 The Future of Background Agents 13:09 Nvidia and the GPU Stack 23:27 Chips, Memory, and Transformers 36:14 The Future of AI Training Data 44:32 Chip Scarcity and Compute Arbitrage 52:44 Reinventing the AI Data Center 59:01 Power and the “Scavenger Strategy” 1:10:10 Open vs. Closed AI

Good to visit with Madison Mayor Ranae Bartlett today! We had a great conversation about Madison’s tremendous growth, the exciting things happening across the community, and of course, the Rocket City Trash Pandas!