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CS Cliff Sosin On Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy)

“Look, you're really smart. So you must understand. Being smart has limits. … If that experiment requires breeding mice and mice need a year to grow up and die, that experiment is going to take time. And it might be a great experiment. You might learn a lot and that's great. Still going to take time. And the lab's only so big.”

Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) · Money & Markets · October 2026

“Look, you're really smart. So you must understand. Being smart has limits. … If that experiment requires breeding mice and mice need a year to grow up and die, that experiment is going to take time. And it might be a great experiment. You might learn a lot and that's great. Still going to take time. And the lab's only so big.” — Cliff Sosin, Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy)

Context

Patrick O'Shaughnessy asked about startups building automated, AI-run labs. Sosin calls them a great idea but says the physical world sets speed limits that no amount of intelligence removes; he doesn't expect a model to suddenly reveal a world we couldn't comprehend.

Transcript

Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) Around 09:25 into the episode
Cliff Sosin

…server. And so I actually don't know what model I'm using anymore. I used to know this model is better, this one's worse. I no longer know. All of this is being optimized on the back end for me. And all I know is that stuff is getting built and it's not using up my subscriptions. And so we're good.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

…what you think about, which is effectively real-world experimentation companies that create a loop that's automatic. There's this happening in robotics. There's this happening in several places in biolabs and automated wet labs, automated testing labs. Any commentary on that kind of company?

Cliff Sosin

…So you must understand. Being smart has limits. Being smart has limits. And so the ability to just think your way to solutions is limited. And so if you're going to build an automatic biology testing laboratory and you're going to connect it to a computer and the computer is going to come up with an idea and then it's going to run an experiment and it's going to iterate, that's awesome. But if that experiment requires breeding mice and mice need a year to grow up and die, that experiment is going to take time. And it might be a great experiment. You might learn a lot and that's great. Still going to take time. And the lab's only so big. And so you might have 5,000 great ideas. You're going to pick 20 and the model may be better. Your odds of that experiment marketing might even be 1%. Turns out that might be 10 times better than the average researcher. And that's amazing. It's still 1%. None of this is to be pessimistic. This is super amazing. Discovering all the things that we should know because it's already in our corpus…

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

It seems like the market has been, especially in private markets and the leading edge of investors thinking about AI, very focused on investing in supply-related stuff. Like how are we going to build and serve all the intelligence versus what I'll call demand-related stuff? Someone watching their…

Cliff Sosin

Super hard. I've joked, I've been willfully ignorant about them and probably I'm sort of worse off for it. But there's this big build out. And then you're trying to forecast inference demand. I can't forecast supply or demand within several orders of magnitude. This idea of how much more inference…

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Maybe this is a time to talk about capital cycles or something. It sure does seem like the smartest people in the world and many or most of the best entrepreneurs in the world are heavily personally invested in this supply build out thing. If you watch SpaceX's Investor Day yesterday, this is…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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