One person. One thesis.
One truth.
Salient Concepts LLC is a Nyack, NY research lab building AI infrastructure for households, hobbyists, and small operations who want to own their compute, their data, and their decisions — without giving any of it up to a third party.
Billy Garcia
Twenty-plus years in network and infrastructure engineering, applied to a problem most of the industry hasn't taken seriously yet: AI sovereignty for normal people. Salient Concepts is the lab where that problem gets worked.
Sovereignty over received truth.
Throughout the COVID and political churn of 2020–2022, one phrase kept coming up: ONE TRUTH. Not "the truth" — your truth, owned and verifiable, audited locally, not handed to you by a platform. That phrase became the company's spine. Read the explainer →
The same problem now repeats at higher stakes in the AI era. Rented intelligence means rented memory, rented judgement, and rented kill-switches. Salient Concepts builds the alternative.
Stage.
Salient Concepts is pre-launch. EPOCH and Aria are running daily across three endpoints — Reachy Mini robot, AudioSocket telephony, and a Pi5 standalone unit. Public access lands as each surface graduates from "stable here" to "stable everywhere." First consumer product — Aria Standalone — coming to Kickstarter.
Self-funded.
Salient Concepts is fully self-funded — no outside capital, no investor pressure, no exit clock. Operating revenue comes from an active eBay storefront (salienttechny) covering both Salient-built hardware (Batmobile bundles) and curated used components — DIMMs, GPUs, peripherals. Revenue feeds back into platform R&D and inference infrastructure.
256 GB pooled VRAM.
NVIDIA DGX Spark GB10 (128 GB unified Blackwell), RTX Pro 6000 (96 GB), RTX 5090 (32 GB). Three-tier inference on owned hardware. Privacy is an architectural property here, not a marketing line.
Nyack, New York.
Hudson Valley. Solar, batteries, fiber, and far too many GPUs.