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The Neuron: AI Explained

The Neurontheneuron.ai
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. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.theneurondaily.com/subscribe
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Episodes

Kari Briski at GTC 2026: The Future of NVIDIA AI & Nemotron 3

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, 202623 minSeason 1Ep. 46

The AI Agent That Compressed 8 Years of R&D Into 2 Weeks

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, 202647 minSeason 1Ep. 45

AI Just Democratized Filmmaking (w/ LTX Co-Founder)

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, 20261 hr 2 minSeason 1Ep. 44

24 Billion AI Uses Later: What Canva Learned About the Future of Design

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, 202655 minSeason 1Ep. 43

BONUS: GPT 5.4 LIVE Test & Learn to Code in 2026: What's Essential vs. What AI Handles Now

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, 20262 hr 1 min

AI Is Helping Build the Power Source It Desperately Needs (Brandon Sorbom w/ Commonwealth Fusion Systems)

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, 20261 hr 4 minSeason 1Ep. 42

BONUS: Gemini 3 Flash (Smartest, Cheapest AI) with Google DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick

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, 20261 hr 59 min

Diffusion for Text: Why Mercury Could Make LLMs 10x Faster

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, 202649 minSeason 1Ep. 41

Can AI Improve Customer Service Without Killing Jobs? Crescendo Thinks So

Customer service is one of the industries most impacted by AI — but what if AI alone isn’t the answer ? In this episode of The Neuron Podcast , Grant Harvey and Corey Noles sit down with Matt Price , Founder & CEO of Crescendo , to explore how AI and humans working together can outperform automation alone. After spending 13+ years at Zendesk, Matt is now building an AI-native customer experience platform that automates up to 90% of tickets with 99.8% accuracy — without sacrificing empathy, t...

Feb 20, 202657 minSeason 1Ep. 40

How Google's Gemini CLI Creator Ships 150 Features a Week

Taylor Mullen, Principal Engineer at Google and creator of Gemini CLI, reveals how his team ships 100-150 features and bug fixes every week—using Gemini CLI to build itself. In this first in-depth interview about Gemini CLI's origin story, we explore why command-line AI agents are having a "terminal renaissance," how Taylor manages swarms of parallel AI agents, and the techniques (like the viral "Ralph Wiggum" method) that separate 10x engineers from 100x engineers. Whether you're a developer or...

Feb 17, 202656 minSeason 1Ep. 39

BONUS: OpenAI Codex Demo, Learn the Absolute Basics of Coding with AI

In this week's live-stream replay, we go live for a 2-hour, hands-on deep dive into GPT-5.1 Codex Max with Alexander Embiricos, product lead for OpenAI Codex. You’ll walk out feeling like an agentic-coding wizard, even if you’re starting from zero. GPT-5.1 Codex Max is OpenAI’s latest frontier agentic coding model. It’s built on an upgraded reasoning backbone and trained to handle real-world software engineering tasks end to end: PRs, refactors, frontend builds, and deep debugging. It can work i...

Feb 13, 20262 hr

Why Energy-Based Models Could Be the Next Big Shift in AI

Modern AI has been dominated by one idea: predict the next token. But what if intelligence doesn’t have to work that way? In this episode of The Neuron , we’re joined by Eve Bodnia , Founder and CEO of Logical Intelligence , to explore energy-based models (EBMs) —a radically different approach to AI reasoning that doesn’t rely on language, tokens, or next-word prediction. With a background in theoretical physics and quantum information, Eve explains how EBMs operate over an energy landscape , al...

Feb 10, 202656 minSeason 1Ep. 38

BONUS: Our 2026 AI Predictions.... Who Wins, Who Loses, and What Changes Everything?

AI is moving fast — and 2026 is shaping up to be a turning point. In this livestream, Corey and Grant from The Neuron break down our biggest AI predictions for 2026, including: 🏆 Which companies, tools, and model types are most likely to come out on top 📉 Who could lose ground (and what’s driving the shift) 🎲 The wildcards most people aren’t factoring in yet 👀 What to watch across AI policy, agents, open source, and consumer adoption 🧠 The skills and strategies that will matter most in 2026...

Feb 06, 20262 hr 41 min

Inside Google Labs: 3 AI Tools That Will Change How You Create

In this special episode, we go hands-on with three cutting-edge AI tools from Google Labs. First, Jaclyn Konzelman (Director of Product Management) demos Mixboard , an AI-powered concepting board that transforms ideas into visual presentations using Nano Banana Pro. Then, Thomas Iljic (Senior Director of Product Management) shows us Flow , Google's AI filmmaking tool that lets you create, edit, and animate video clips with unprecedented control. Finally, Megan Li (Senior Product Manager) walks u...

Feb 03, 20261 hr 57 minSeason 1Ep. 37

This AI Agent Builds Better Code Than Most Developers (Factory AI)

Autonomous coding agents are moving from demos to real production workflows. In this episode, Factory AI co-founder and CTO Eno Reyes explains what "Droids" really are—fully autonomous agents that can take tickets, modify real codebases, run tests, and work inside existing dev workflows. We dig into Factory's context compression research (which outperformed both OpenAI and Anthropic), what makes a codebase "agent-ready," and why Stanford research found that the ONLY predictor of AI success was c...

Jan 27, 202656 minSeason 1Ep. 36

OpenAI Researcher Explains How AI Hides Its Thinking (w/ OpenAI’s Bowen Baker)

AI reasoning models don’t just give answers — they plan, deliberate, and sometimes try to cheat. In this episode of The Neuron , we’re joined by Bowen Baker , Research Scientist at OpenAI , to explore whether we can monitor AI reasoning before things go wrong — and why that transparency may not last forever. Bowen walks us through real examples of AI reward hacking, explains why monitoring chain-of-thought is often more effective than checking outputs, and introduces the idea of a “monitorabilit...

Jan 23, 202655 minSeason 1Ep. 35

The Hidden Cost of AI Agents No One Talks About

Everyone is rushing to build AI agents — but most companies are setting themselves up for failure. In this episode of The Neuron , Darin Patterson , VP of Market Strategy at Make , explains why agentic AI only works if your automation foundation is solid first. We break down when to use deterministic workflows vs AI agents, how to avoid fragile automation sprawl, and why visibility into your entire automation landscape is now mission-critical. You’ll see real examples of building agents in Make,...

Jan 20, 20261 hr 1 minSeason 1Ep. 34

Why IBM Wants AI to Be Boring

IBM just released Granite 4.0, a new family of open language models designed to be fast, memory-efficient, and enterprise-ready — and it represents a very different philosophy from today’s frontier AI race. In this episode of The Neuron, IBM Research’s David Cox joins us to unpack why IBM treats AI models as tools rather than entities, how hybrid architectures dramatically reduce memory and cost, and why openness, transparency, and external audits matter more than ever for real-world deployment....

Jan 13, 202653 minSeason 1Ep. 33

This AI Grows a Brain During Training (Pathway’s AI w/ Zuzanna Stamirowska)

Imagine an AI that doesn’t just output answers — it remembers, adapts, and reasons over time like a living system. In this episode of The Neuron , Corey Noles and Grant Harvey sit down with Zuzanna Stamirowska, CEO & Cofounder of Pathway, to break down the world’s first post-Transformer frontier model: BDH — the Dragon Hatchling architecture. Zuzanna explains why current language models are stuck in a “Groundhog Day” loop — waking up with no memory — and how Pathway’s architecture introduces...

Jan 06, 202649 minSeason 1Ep. 32

This 24-Year-Old Raised $64M to Build an AI Smarter Than the World's Best Mathematicians

Carina Hong dropped out of Stanford's PhD program to build "mathematical superintelligence" — and just raised $64M to do it. In this episode, we explore what that actually means: an AI that doesn't just solve math problems but discovers new theorems, proves them formally, and gets smarter with each iteration. Carina explains how her team solved a 130-year-old problem about Lyapunov functions, disproved a 30-year-old graph theory conjecture, and why math is the secret "bedrock" for everything fro...

Dec 30, 202559 minSeason 1Ep. 31

How AI is Reinventing Chemistry (From a Trailer Lab to a $32B Partnership)

Nick Talken started a 3D printing materials company in a trailer lab in his co-founder's backyard, sold it to a 145-year-old German chemical giant, then spun out an AI platform that's now transforming R&D for Fortune 100 companies. Albert Invent's foundational AI model—trained on 15 million molecular structures—is helping scientists at companies like Kenvue (maker of Tylenol, Neutrogena, and Listerine) compress projects from 3 months to 2 days. We dig into how enterprises train bespoke AI mo...

Dec 23, 202541 minSeason 1Ep. 30

Your AI Meeting Agents Aren’t Enough: Otter.ai's Sam Liang on Enterprise Knowledge

Most enterprise knowledge is trapped in meetings—and then lost forever. Otter.ai CEO Sam Liang explains how his company turned meeting transcription into a $100M+ revenue business by solving a problem most companies don't even realize they have.In this episode, we cover:- Why meetings are your company's most expensive activity (and how to measure ROI on them)- Building a "meeting-centric knowledge base" that captures voice data other systems miss- How Otter organizes enterprise knowledge like Sl...

Dec 16, 202551 minSeason 1Ep. 29

The Future of Windows: AI-Native Computing with Pavan Davuluri

In this episode, we sit down with Pavan Davuluri, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Windows + Devices business, to explore how Windows is evolving into an AI-native platform. Pavan leads the team responsible for strategy, design, and delivery of Windows products across the full stack - from silicon and devices to platform, OS, apps, experiences, security, and cloud. With 23 years at Microsoft, he's driven the creation of the Surface line and now oversees how hardware and software fuse toge...

Dec 03, 202531 minSeason 1Ep. 28

The "Android Moment" for AI Infrastructure: Why Modular Just Raised $250M

While everyone obsesses over which AI model is smartest, a quiet revolution is happening in the infrastructure layer underneath. Modular just raised $250M at a $1.6B valuation to solve a problem most people don't know exists: AI is locked into expensive, vendor-specific hardware ecosystems. Tim Davis, Co-Founder & President of Modular, joins us to explain why his company is building the "hypervisor for AI"—making it possible to write code once and run it on any GPU, from NVIDIA to AMD to App...

Nov 26, 20251 hr 1 minSeason 1Ep. 27

Inside Microsoft's AI Superfactory with Scott Guthrie

In this episode, we sit down with Scott Guthrie, EVP of Microsoft's Cloud + AI Group, to explore the architecture behind Azure's AI Superfactory. Scott oversees Microsoft's hyperscale cloud computing solutions including Azure, generative AI platforms, and next-generation infrastructure. We dive into Microsoft's strategic approach to AI datacenter buildout, the innovative Fairwater architecture with its 120,000+ fiber miles of AI WAN backbone, and how Microsoft is balancing performance, sustainab...

Nov 23, 202532 minSeason 1Ep. 26

How 48% of Non-Engineers Are Shipping Production Software (with Retool CEO David Hsu)

Retool CEO David Hsu reveals that 48% of non-engineers are now shipping software. We explore how AI is democratizing software development, why engineers might stop coding internal apps within 18-24 months, and what this means for the future of work. David shares insights from Retool's survey of 10,000+ companies, Retool’s new AppGen program, and how "tomorrow's developers" are using AI to build real production applications on enterprise data. Subscribe to The Neuron newsletter: https://theneuron...

Nov 17, 202551 minSeason 1Ep. 25

Teaching Computers to Smell?! The AI That's Digitizing Scent

Computers can see and hear, but they've never been able to smell—until now. In this episode, we sit down with Alex Wiltschko, Founder & CEO of Osmo, to explore how his company is using AI to digitize scent. Alex walks us through how they "teleported" the smell of a fresh plum across their lab, created the world's first AI-designed fragrance molecules, and built Osmo Studio—a platform that lets anyone design custom fragrances in one week instead of two years. We discuss the read/map/write fra...

Nov 07, 202553 minSeason 1Ep. 24

The Humans Behind AI: How Invisible Technologies Trains 80% of the World's Top Models

Behind every AI response, there's an invisible army of humans who trained it. In this episode, we talk with Casper Elliott from Invisible Technologies - the company that's trained 80% of the world's top AI models. We explore how models actually learn, why data quality matters more than quantity, what enterprises get wrong about AI deployment, and whether AI will really automate everyone's jobs. Casper shares insights from working with frontier labs, reveals the surprising skills that make great ...

Nov 07, 20251 hr 2 minSeason 1Ep. 23

The Humans Behind AI: How Invisible Technologies Trains 80% of the World's Top Models

Ever wondered who's actually teaching ChatGPT and Claude how to think? Meet Caspar Eliot from Invisible Technologies - the company behind 80% of the world's top AI model training. In this eye-opening conversation, we uncover the massive human workforce behind "artificial" intelligence, why your League of Legends skills might land you an AI job, and the shocking mistakes enterprises make when deploying AI. We discuss: • How AI models really learn (hint: it's not just scraping the internet) • Why ...

Nov 03, 20251 hr 2 minSeason 1Ep. 23

Inside Adobe's AI Strategy with CTO Ely Greenfield

From Adobe Max 2025 in Los Angeles, Corey and Grant sit down with Ely Greenfield, Adobe's Chief Technology Officer, to explore the philosophy behind Adobe's practical AI strategy. Discover why the crowd went wild over AI renaming layers, how Adobe thinks about "additive not subtractive" AI, and where creative tools are heading next. Ely shares Adobe's vision for making AI a creative partner that enhances rather than replaces human artistry, and explains why the best AI features are often the mos...

Oct 31, 202532 minSeason 1Ep. 22
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