Inference Time Tactics

In this episode, Cooper sits down with Neurometric CEO, Rob May, to talk through a big-news month: the show's rebrand from Inference Time Tactics to Token Engineering, the launch of tokenminning.com as a response to the "tokenmaxxing" trend, Neurometric's new token engineering platform and fundraising announcement. But the bigger conversation is about why Rob thinks "token engineering" is about to...

In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Cooper sits down with Yash Sharma, Head of AI Research at Neurometric AI, to break down the Pioneer Agent paper from Fastino Labs—a system that uses Claude Sonnet as an ML engineer in a box to build and improve small language models end-to-end. From cold start data curation to production failure diagnosis, the paper argues the real bottleneck in SLM creat...

In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Cooper sits down with Fletcher Wimbush, CEO of Discovered AI, to get into what’s actually broken about hiring—and how 13 years of bootstrapped recruiting, 10,000 interviews, and four peer-reviewed journal articles became the foundation for a platform now outperforming its biggest competitors. With hundreds of applicants flooding every open role and genera...

Every day billions of voice conversations happen across games, customer service calls, and financial transactions. Almost none of them are understood by machines. In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Calvin Cooper and Yash Sharma sit down with Carter Huffman, CTO and co founder of Modulate, to explore the AI systems that can finally understand voice conversations in real time.   Modulate’s m...

In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Cooper and Byron sit down with Charlie and Anil from Rapt AI to tackle one of the industry's most expensive problems: GPU underutilization. With half a trillion dollars invested in GPU infrastructure running at just 20-30% utilization, Rapt AI is building AI-powered orchestration that automatically analyzes workloads and matches them to the right compute...

In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Rob, Cooper, and Byron sit down with Shawn Rogers, CEO of BARC US to unpack fresh data from 421 organizations actively deploying AI in production. Shawn shares what separates the 20% of AI leaders from everyone else, why cost surprises are hitting harder than expected, and how the pressure to "just do AI" is causing companies to skip critical foundations—...

In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Cooper and Byron break down NeuroMetric's Thinking Algorithm Leaderboard and what it reveals about building production-ready AI agents. They share why prompt engineering with a single model won't cut it for enterprise use cases, explore the impact of inference-time compute strategies, and discuss what they learned from testing 10 models across real CRM ta...

In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Rob and Cooper from Neurometric sit down with Yash Sharma, an AI researcher whose work is reshaping how we understand model generalization. Yash recently completed his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and has held research roles at Google Brain, Meta AI, Amazon, Borealis AI, and IBM Research. His studies on compositional generalizat...

In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Rob, Cooper, and Byron sit down with Prashanth Velidandi, co-founder of InferX, to explore how serverless inference is tackling the AI “cold start problem.” They dig into why 90% of the model lifecycle happens at inference—not training—and how cold starts and idle GPUs are crippling efficiency. Prashanth explains InferX’s snapshot technology, what it take...

Check out the latest episode of Inference Time Tactics. Our guest is Pawan Deshpande, founder, product leader, and angel investor in companies like Anthropic and Toast, with roles at Google, Scale AI and Domino Data Lab.    Hosts Rob May & Calvin Cooper sit down with Pawan to cover: Early MIT NLP research applied to today’s inference-time tradeoffs How to evaluate enterprise agents in practice...

In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Rob, Cooper, Byron, and Dave share product updates for Neurometric’s Inference Time Compute Studio and what they reveal about the shift from single models to full AI systems. They discuss why wiring models together at scale is so challenging, how a drag-and-drop interface can make experimenting with inference strategies easier, and why open source, benchm...

In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Rob, Cooper, and Byron explore Salesforce’s CRMArena-Pro benchmark and what it reveals about the limits of enterprise AI agents. They share why benchmark scores often fail in production, how inference-time tactics like best-of-N can improve reliability, and what NeuroMetric is building to make eval easier—from an ITC Test Engine to a drag-and-drop interfa...

In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Rob and Cooper unpack the launch of GPT 5.0 and what OpenAI’s new routing layer signals about the shifting AI landscape. They explore the tradeoffs of cost, latency, and accuracy, zoom out to programmable inference in an agent-driven world, and track the ripple effects on chips, data centers, and energy use. We talked about:   Why GPT 5.0’s launch felt mo...

In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Rob, Cooper, and CTO Byron unpack Apple’s “Illusion of Thinking” paper—why it split the AI community, what it reveals about reasoning model limits, and how hidden thinking traces shape performance. They share insights from building an open-source tool to reproduce the study, explain why models loop, overthink, or stall, and outline what it will take to bu...

In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Rob and Cooper dig into the strategic trade-offs driving a major shift in AI: why some enterprises start with closed models like OpenAI or Anthropic, then move to open-source stacks. The team breaks down the challenges of switching and how inference-time compute is becoming a competitive differentiator. They also unpack why pricing is shifting, how govern...

Welcome to the very first episode of Inference Time Tactics — the podcast for builders, researchers, and engineers pushing the limits of AI performance. In this kickoff conversation, hosts Rob May and Cooper (co-founders of Neurometric AI) break down why inference time compute is emerging as the third scaling law of AI — and why it matters more than ever. They unpack: What “inference time compute”...