The Neuron: AI Explained

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 Boar...

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, inc...

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...

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” t...

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 t...

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. Su...

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...

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 Wa...

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...

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 everythi...

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...

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 "...

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 m...

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 y...

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:...

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 ho...

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, knowl...

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 simpl...

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 experien...

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 (li...

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 s...

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 theo...

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, a...

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...

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...