Had so much fun giving this talk at @sequoia about @harvey’s moneyball approach to building a research lab. The biggest mistake I made in th…

Had so much fun giving this talk at @sequoia about @harvey’s moneyball approach to building a research lab. The biggest mistake I made in the early days of Harvey was trying to play the Yankees baseball style of frontier intelligence. I found out the hard way that we were the Oakland As - we couldn’t raise the capital or attract the talent to build a frontier lab. However a lot has changed since then and it now feels possible to build frontier intelligence without a frontier budget. Winston and I’s most quoted line from Moneyball is “We can recreate him in the aggregate” when Billy Bean talks about his strategy for building the team The talk outlines our playbook to building frontier intelligence in the aggregate and how we leveraged the frontier ecosystem to do so. This is only now possible with inference providers like @FireworksAI_HQ and @baseten, neolabs like @trajectorylabs, @appliedcompute, and @EngramLab, data providers like @mercor_ai, eval infra like @LangChain and many more. I talk about how we build training data and benchmarks, work with the neolabs and training infra providers to post-train, and give an overview of our serving and eval infra to ensure post trained models work in our product. At the end of Moneyball Billy says that if they don’t win everyone will dismiss this strategy but “if we win, with this budget, and this team, we will have changed the game”. Every application layer company, software company, frontier ecosystem company and startup now has a massive opportunity to play moneyball for frontier intelligence. Go change the game. Want world class research capabilities, but don’t have the resources of a big lab? At our recent Sovereign AI event, @gabepereyra shared @harvey ’s “moneyball” approach. Here’s the playbook: 00:00 Introduction 00:37 Building a research lab on a budget 02:28 Legal Agent Bench, con…

Related

• Epic talk: the cheat code for how to build your own in-house lab, featuring @gabepereyra of @harvey
• Every year for AI Ascent, @gradypb, @Konstantine and I get to share some perspectives on AI and where things are headed. This year's talk wa…
• @karpathy and I are back! At @sequoia AI Ascent 2026. And a lot has changed. Last year, he coined “vibe coding”. This year, he’s never felt …
• Early research with @LangChain Labs on building more efficient verifiers for agent work product.

Source: Sonya Huang (X) | 2026-08-11