What if the next big AI breakthrough is not a bigger model, but a completely different kind of computer? Jeff Shainline, co-founder and CEO of Great Sky, joins The Neuron to explain how his team is building brain-inspired AI hardware using superconductors, photonics, and analog computation. Great Sky’s architecture, called Superconducting Optoelectronic Networks, or SOENs, is designed to move beyond the traditional GPU roadmap by co-locating memory and processing, communicating with light, and m...
May 27, 2026•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 59
Voice agents are moving from “cool demo” to real product infrastructure. In this livestream, we’re joined by Ben Cherry of LiveKit to break down what it actually takes to build real-time AI agents that can listen, respond, interrupt, call tools, and work in production. LiveKit is an open source framework and developer platform for building voice, video, and physical AI agents in production. We’ll talk through the stack behind real-time AI experiences, then build and test a live demo together on ...
May 22, 2026•1 hr 9 min
What happens when AI stops simply giving answers and starts producing proofs a computer can verify? In this episode of The Neuron , Corey Noles and Grant Harvey talk with Tudor Achim, Co-Founder and CEO of Harmonic, the company behind Aristotle — a formal reasoning system built to generate machine-checkable mathematical proofs. Tudor explains why math may be the clearest test case for moving AI from “trust me” to “check me,” and why formal verification could matter far beyond Olympiad benchmarks...
May 20, 2026•47 min•Season 1Ep. 58
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and as AI becomes more embedded in our daily lives, one of the biggest questions we face is whether these systems can responsibly support emotional and psychological well-being. AI chatbots are increasingly being used for emotional support, but recent lawsuits faced by OpenAI and earlier ones targeting character.ai and Google's AI Overviews, as well as clinical reports, and internal research have raised valid concerns about their impact on vulnerable users. ...
May 15, 2026•1 hr 14 min
Genspark went from AI search startup to autonomous AI agent platform, hitting $250M ARR in 12 months with no paid ads until they bought a Super Bowl spot. Co-founder and COO Wen Sang joins Corey and Grant to explain what "AI employee" actually means, demos Genspark Claw live (including buying us coffee mid-interview), and lays out his big thesis: legacy software is becoming infrastructure while AI agents become the new interface between humans and work. We get hands-on with Workspace 4.0, Claw, ...
May 13, 2026•45 min
New to AI and not sure where to start? Join us live Thursday for The AI Starter Kit: What to Try...and What to Ignore. This beginner-friendly session will help you cut through the noise and focus on the AI tools, habits, and prompts that actually matter. By the end, you’ll know what to try first, what not to worry about yet, and how to ask better questions when you get stuck. In this session, we’ll cover: 🚀 The best first steps for AI beginners 🛠️ What tools and features are worth trying now �...
May 08, 2026•2 hr 3 min
Can AI move from predicting proteins to actually designing new drugs? Isomorphic Labs is trying to answer one of the biggest questions in science. In this episode of The Neuron , Corey Noles and Grant Harvey talk with Rebecca Paul, Head of Medicinal Drug Design at Isomorphic Labs, and Michael Schaarschmidt, Foundational AI Research Lead. They explain why drug discovery is so slow, expensive, and failure-prone—and why AI drug design is much more complicated than “generate a molecule and ship it.”...
May 06, 2026•42 min•Season 1Ep. 56
Join us Thursday as we break down OpenAI’s new Workspace Agents and what they mean for the future of work. We’ll cover: ⚙️ What workspace agents are 🤖 How they differ from regular chatbots 🏢 Where they fit into real team workflows 🚀 How to start working with them effectively 🔄 What agentic AI means for workplace automation 📈 Why teams are shifting from one-off prompts to repeatable AI-powered processes Whether you’re experimenting with ChatGPT at work, leading AI adoption, or trying to unde...
May 01, 2026•1 hr 24 min
Google just acquired an AI startup that lets anyone create real music, music videos, and custom instruments — no experience required. In this hands-on episode, Corey sits down with Kendall Rankin from Google to demo Flow Music (formerly Producer AI), the generative music tool now living inside Google Labs. They build a garage rock song about AI from scratch, generate a music video with VEO, and dig into what "amplifying human creativity" actually looks like when the tool can do most of the lifti...
Apr 29, 2026•39 min•Season 1Ep. 55
OpenAI dropped GPT-5.5, so we did the only reasonable thing: went live immediately and tried to break it. In this off-the-cuff Neuron Live, Corey and Grant walk through OpenAI's GPT-5.5 release notes, benchmark claims, rollout details, and early access reactions before testing the model live across coding, reasoning, creativity, web research, and absurd prompt challenges. We also compare a few GPT-5.5 responses against Claude Opus 4.7, test Codex, build a new version of Cat Doom, and ask the imp...
Apr 25, 2026•1 hr 40 min
Grant and Kyle dive into a comprehensive review and live test of the newly released Claude Opus 4.7, a cutting-edge large language model. This session explores its capabilities for coding and game dev, specifically referencing the "Renaissance / Plan Final Fantasy Tactics RPG Game" project. Discover how this ai model performs under pressure and its potential impact on game design workflows. 🔴 LIVE at 9:30AM PT / 12:30PM ET Anthropic just dropped Claude Opus 4.7, and we’re putting it through the...
Apr 17, 2026•1 hr 2 min
AI can reason about text and images, but it still struggles to understand the physical world. In this episode, Grant sits down with Peter Wilczynski, Chief Product Officer at Vantor (formerly Maxar Intelligence / Digital Globe), to unpack why spatial intelligence is emerging as critical AI infrastructure. Peter spent years at Palantir building ontology systems and mapping tools for defense operations before joining Vantor, where his team has built a 100M+ square kilometer 3D model of the entire ...
Apr 15, 2026•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 54
Brandon Baum — better known as heybrandonb to his 25M+ followers — built a YouTube empire making cinematic, effects-heavy videos that look like they cost millions but were born in a bedroom during COVID. In this episode, we get into how he went from 2 views to a million followers in a month, why he shoots everything on iPhones with a custom 3D-printed dual-phone rig, how AI tools like Firefly Boards have replaced his Post-it Note wall, and why he thinks the atmosphere is "ripe for change" in Hol...
Apr 12, 2026•56 min•Season 1Ep. 53
Let’s build with v0 in real time. We’re going LIVE with Tom Occhino, Chief Product Officer at Vercel, to explore vibe coding and take a hands-on look at v0, Vercel’s AI-powered development platform for building apps faster. We’ll show v0 live and walk through how it turns a simple prompt into a real, shippable interface. Tom will also explain what “vibe coding” actually looks like in practice, including how teams are using it today and where it fits into modern development workflows. What we’ll ...
Apr 10, 2026•1 hr 59 min
A team of former Google DeepMind researchers just raised $2B to build America's answer to DeepSeek. In this episode, we sit down with Ioannis Antonoglou (Yannis), co-founder and CTO of Reflection AI, who helped create AlphaGo—the AI that beat the world champion in the game of Go back in 2016. Yannis breaks down what Reflection is building, why they're releasing frontier-level AI models as open-weight, and how mixture-of-experts architecture lets massive models run efficiently. We dig into reinfo...
Apr 08, 2026•47 min•Season 1Ep. 52
This video is a re-upload from our livestream on YouTube. Most people are still using ChatGPT the way they used Google in 2005: type a question, get an answer, close the tab. In 2026, that’s like owning a professional kitchen and only using the microwave. In this episode, Grant and Corey walk through The Neuron’s 5-Level AI Proficiency Stack — a framework for going from “I use ChatGPT sometimes” to “AI saves me 10 hours a week.” No coding required. No hype. Just the actual progression that separ...
Apr 03, 2026•2 hr 23 min
Brian Gerkey is the CTO of Intrinsic, the robotics software company that started inside Alphabet and now sits inside Google, working directly with DeepMind and Gemini. Brian co-created ROS (Robot Operating System), the open-source platform used by over 1 million developers that powers everything from factory robots to NASA's Astrobee on the International Space Station. In this episode, Grant talks with Brian about "physical AI" — what happens when AI leaves the screen and starts controlling robo...
Apr 01, 2026•49 min•Season 1Ep. 51
Most businesses don't buy their AI services directly from OpenAI or Google—they buy it through a massive, invisible distribution network called "the channel." Victoria Durgin and Katie Bavoso of Channel Insider join Corey and Grant to explain how this hidden industry works, why AI is shaking it up unlike anything before, and what it means for businesses trying to adopt AI in 2026. Subscribe to The Neuron newsletter: https://theneuron.ai Channel Insider: https://channelinsider.com...
Mar 30, 2026•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 50
In this episode of The Neuron Podcast, Corey Noles and Grant Harvey sit down with Dan Shipper, CEO of Every, to talk about agent-native engineering—the framework his team uses to build and ship AI-powered products at a pace most companies can't match. Dan walks us through what happened when his AI document editor Proof went viral (and then went down), why he believes the way we build software is fundamentally changing, and how Every's small team manages to ship and maintain an entire suite of AI...
Mar 27, 2026•1 hr 38 min
Nick Heiner leads RL environment development at Surge AI, the bootstrapped company that hit $1.2B in revenue training models for OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google. In this episode, we break down reinforcement learning environments—the secret training grounds where AI agents learn to actually do work. Nick shares why even the best models fail 40% of real workplace tasks, what happened when 200 Wall Street experts graded GPT-5 and Claude, and his prediction that a $1B company with one human empl...
Mar 25, 2026•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 49
Proton—the company behind the world's largest encrypted email service with 100M+ users—just launched Lumo, a privacy-first AI assistant. We sit down with Eamonn Maguire, who leads Proton's ML team and built Lumo from the ground up. Eamonn has a PhD from Oxford and a postdoc at CERN, and he breaks down how Lumo's encryption actually works, why Big Tech's business model prevents them from building private AI, the real privacy threats hiding inside viral AI trends like Ghibli-fication, and whether ...
Mar 22, 2026•1 hr 41 min•Season 1Ep. 47
Carta CMO Nicole Baer joins Corey and Grant to break down the real state of startups in 2026. With half of all venture funding now flowing to AI-native companies and seed deals at a six-year low, the startup playbook has fundamentally changed. Nicole shares Carta’s data on solo founders, the new billion-dollar timeline, why the Bay Area’s grip is tighter than ever, and how AI is reshaping everything from marketing to fund administration. Carta State of Startups 2025 Report: https://carta.com/blo...
Mar 20, 2026•49 min•Season 1Ep. 46
Recorded live at NVIDIA GTC 2026 in San Jose, Corey sits down with returning guest Kari Briski—VP of Generative AI Software for Enterprise at NVIDIA—to unpack their biggest open-source model yet: Nemotron 3 Super. Kari breaks down why a 120B-parameter model runs as fast as a 12B one, how multi-agent systems are going from science fiction to production, and why Jensen Huang is calling this "a new operating system." We also dig into NVIDIA's work on Open Claw security, the 35x explosion in open-mo...
Mar 19, 2026•23 min•Season 1Ep. 46
Scientific discovery has always been slow. Until now. In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Qichao Hu, CEO of SES AI, to reveal how they are using AI agents to turn a 8-year research cycle into a 2-week sprint. By combining autonomous "wet labs" with advanced AI models, they are solving one of the hardest physics problems in tech: the battery bottleneck. We dive deep into how this "Molecular Universe" project isn't just about EV batteries—it's about unlocking power for data centers, robotics, an...
Mar 15, 2026•47 min•Season 1Ep. 45
In this episode, we sit down with Yaron Inger, co-founder of Lightricks and LTX , to explore the future of open-source AI video. LTX-2 is currently the #1 ranked open-source audio & video model on Hugging Face — with over 4.5 million downloads in just two months. But what makes it different? It runs locally. It can be fine-tuned on your own IP. It integrates into real video workflows. And it might change how filmmaking, education, and creative work evolve in the AI era. We talk about: • Why ...
Mar 12, 2026•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 44
You've probably used Canva—but you probably haven't seen what it can do with AI. In this episode of The Neuron, we sit down with Danny Wu, Head of AI Products at Canva, to explore how the platform went from a simple design tool to a full-blown "Creative Operating System" powered by AI—serving 230+ million users every month. Danny walks us through how Canva's MCP server lets you create fully editable designs from inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot, why their new Canva Design Model is f...
Mar 10, 2026•55 min•Season 1Ep. 43
Ryan Carson taught over 1,000,000 people how to code at Treehouse and spent 25% of his entire life doing it. Now he says everything about that process needs to change. In this livestream, Ryan joins Corey Noles and Grant Harvey to rethink programming education from scratch. When AI agents can write production code, pass competitive coding challenges, and ship features while you sleep. We'll cover:🧠 What’s still fundamental when agents handle the syntax 🔄 Where beginners should start in 2026 (i...
Mar 06, 2026•2 hr 1 min
AI data centers are going to double their power consumption by 2030—so where's all that energy coming from? One answer is fusion, the same process that powers the sun. In this episode of The Neuron, we're joined by Brandon Sorbom, Chief Science Officer and Co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, to explore how his company is racing to build the world's first commercial fusion power plant—and how AI is helping them get there faster. Brandon explains why fusion has been "30 years away" for deca...
Mar 03, 2026•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 42
From the YT live archives: Google just dropped Gemini 3 Flash—a model that outperforms Gemini 2.5 Pro (their last top model) while running 3x faster at less than 1/4 the cost. It's frontier-level reasoning at Flash-level speed, and it's rolling out globally right now. We're sitting down with Logan Kilpatrick from Google DeepMind to explore what this actually means for developers, knowledge workers, and anyone trying to figure out how AI fits into their workflow. What we'll cover: 🔥 Live demos –...
Feb 27, 2026•1 hr 59 min
Diffusion models changed how we generate images and video—now they’re coming for text. In this episode, we sit down with Stefano Ermon, Stanford computer science professor and founder of Inception Labs, to unpack how diffusion works for language, why it can generate in parallel (instead of token-by-token), and what that means for latency, cost, and real-time AI products. We talk through: The simplest mental model for diffusion: generate a full draft, then refine it by “fixing mistakes” Why today...
Feb 24, 2026•49 min•Season 1Ep. 41
