The Neuron: AI Explained

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 for...

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 some...

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 ...

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...

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 t...

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 &l...

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 hav...

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 be...

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 ...

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 des...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 hi...

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 Po...

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, in...

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-exper...

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 &ldqu...