The Neuron is a daily newsletter with 700,000+ readers that covers the latest AI developments, trends and research; this is our podcast, hosted by Grant Harvey and Corey Noles. We aim to create digestible, informative and authoritative takes on AI that get you up to speed and help you become an authority in your own circles. Available Wednesdays and Sundays on all podcasting platforms and YouTube.
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Larry Meadows, Head of Product Strategy & Evangelism for HP's Workforce Experience Platform (WXP), joins us to break down how HP is using AI to predict and prevent IT problems before employees ever notice them. We get a live demo of the platform—from AI-powered software recommendations across 50M+ devices to automated remediation in 3–4 clicks—and dig into the global memory crisis, shadow AI risks, and why IT leaders are drowning in portals. Whether you manage a fleet of 50 devices or 50,000...
Confused by AI Skills, Projects, Gems, Custom GPTs, and Agents? You're not alone. It's important to separate which is best for which use-case, because each has a place depending on what you're trying to get done. In this beginner-friendly live episode, we break down what these AI terms actually mean, who creates them, and when everyday users should use each one. Think of this as your plain-English map to the new AI assistant world: ✅ Projects = places to organize ongoing work ✅ Gems & Custom...
AI can write code, pass exams, and summarize the web, but ask it to reason through a real-world image, and the magic often breaks. Andrew Dai, co-founder and CEO of Elorian, joins The Neuron to explain why visual reasoning may be one of the biggest unsolved problems in AI. Andrew spent years at Google Brain and DeepMind, including work connected to Gemini and sparse mixture-of-experts systems. Now, he’s building Elorian around a simple but powerful idea: if AI is going to understand the physical...
Live from Microsoft Build, Corey Noles sits down with Scott Hanselman for a hands-on Neuron LIVE episode about AI-augmented software development, how it differs from just "vibe coding", and the surprisingly practical things people can now build with tools like GitHub Copilot and more. Scott is one of the best technical explainers in software: a longtime Microsoft and GitHub developer, teacher, speaker, author, blogger, and podcaster who has helped millions of developers understand new technology...
In this episode of The Neuron , Corey Noles sits down with Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, at Microsoft Build 2026 to unpack Microsoft’s next AI chapter: seven new MAI models, a push toward in-house model development, and the idea of Humanist Superintelligence. Mustafa explains how Microsoft is thinking about AI that can reason, code, generate images, transcribe speech, and power real products—without turning the future into a vague AGI race. The conversation gets into what “humanist” mea...
Everyone is talking about Mercury-alpha, the mystery model that many believe could be GPT-5.6. In this live discussion, we're separating fact from speculation and unpacking what would actually matter if OpenAI releases a new flagship model this week. We'll cover: 🔹 What Mercury-alpha is (and why people think it's GPT-5.6) 🔹 The biggest rumors and evidence so far 🔹 What a new OpenAI model would need to deliver to move the industry forward 🔹 How Mercury-alpha fits into the broader AI agent rac...
How do you prove there’s a real human on the other side of the screen when AI can generate faces, IDs, accounts, agents, and entire swarms of bots? Tiago Sada, Chief Product Officer at Tools for Humanity, joins The Neuron to explain why proof of human may become one of the internet’s most important trust layers. Tools for Humanity is building the technology behind World and World ID, a system designed to verify that someone is a real, unique person without requiring them to reveal their identity...
AI agents and automation sound complex, but they’re really about one simple idea: helping you spend less time on repetitive work and more time on the things that need your judgment. In this beginner-friendly Neuron Live, we’ll break down what AI agents are, how automation actually works, and how to start using both without getting overwhelmed. You’ll learn: 🤖 How AI agents are different from regular chatbots ⚙️ What actually happens inside an automation workflow 🧰 Where tools like ChatGPT, Cla...
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...
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 ...
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 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. ...
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, ...
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 �...
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.”...
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...
This episode demos Google's Flow Music, an AI platform that empowers users to create music, custom instruments, and music videos without prior experience. Host Corey Knowles and Google's Kendall Rankin build a garage rock song about AI from scratch, iterate on it, and generate a music video. They also discuss how AI amplifies human creativity in various artist workflows, the importance of watermarking (SynthID), and the platform's ability to serve both emerging and professional creators.
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
