The Cognitive Revolution Podcast: Positron Co-founder on Memory Wall and Token Spend Exceeding Salaries
This episode features interviews with Thomas Sohmers, co-founder of AI inference chip company Positron, and swyx, founder of Latent Space, discussing hardware memory bottlenecks, enterprise token spending surpassing salary costs, and how agents are reshaping software engineering and SaaS.
This episode of The Cognitive Revolution podcast (published October 8, 2026) aggregates recent perspectives from several AI practitioners, focusing on specific constraints and cost structures in current AI engineering practices. It includes notes from The Curve conference and segments from interviews with named guests.
On the hardware front, Thomas Sohmers, co-founder and CTO of AI inference chip company Positron, explained why his company bet on commodity LPDDR memory instead of high-end memory. He claimed that NVIDIA GPUs realize only 30-40% of their theoretical memory bandwidth during the decode pass, whereas Positron's first-generation product achieves 93%. He also noted that as model context lengths increase and concurrent agent counts rise, memory capacity becomes the primary limiting factor. Additionally, Sohmers revealed that token spending has become Positron's largest non-manufacturing line item, briefly exceeding total employee salaries, with peak daily spending over $100,000.
In software engineering, swyx (Shawn Wang), who runs the Latent Space podcast and AI Engineer conferences, discussed how agents are changing software development. He pointed out that demand for engineers who can efficiently manage coding agents is increasing, but there is also an "LLM psychosis" phenomenon where employees submit low-quality AI-generated code. He mentioned his "Kill My SaaS" initiative, aimed at replacing expensive mid-tier SaaS subscriptions with AI-generated custom software, and stated that CPU shortages are currently reported more consistently than GPU or memory issues among the companies he interviews.