The Neuron: AI Explained

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 employee could exist by 2030.

Resources: 
• Surge AI Research – Hierarchy of Agentic Capabilities: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09032
• Surge AI Blog: https://surgehq.ai/blog
• Nick's Sonnet 4.5 Review: https://surgehq.ai/blog/sonnet-4-5-product-take
• Nick’s Substack: https://nickheiner.substack.com/ 
• SurgeHQ’s enterprisebench: https://surgehq.ai/blog/enterprisebench-corecraft 
• Nick’s hilarious Gemini 3.1 review: https://nickheiner.substack.com/p/gemini-31-pro-not-leading-edge-also  
• Hemingway-bench AI Writing Leaderboard https://surgehq.ai/blog/hemingway-bench-ai-writing-leaderboard 
• LMArena is a cancer on AI: https://surgehq.ai/blog/lmarena-is-a-plague-on-ai 
• Check out our sponsor: Dell AI Factory - https://dell.com/YourWayToAI

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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 AI agents are safe to connect to your bank account.

Listeners will learn how encrypted AI handles your data differently, what open-source models power Lumo, and why "set-and-forget" agents are still more hype than reality.

🔗 Links & Resources:
Lumo by Proton: https://lumo.proton.me 

Proton: https://proton.me 

Lumo 1.3 (Projects): https://proton.me/blog/lumo-1-3 

Lumo for Business: https://proton.me/blog/lumo-business 

Proton Sheets: https://proton.me/blog/sheets-proton-drive 

CLI for Proton Pass: https://proton.me/blog/proton-pass-cli 

Reserve your child's email: https://proton.me/mail/born-private/email 

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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/blog/state-of-startups-2025/

Carta Data & Insights (free): https://carta.com/data/

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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-model token generation, and where omni-modal AI is heading next.

Subscribe to The Neuron newsletter: https://theneuron.ai

Relevant links:
NVIDIA Build (try Nemotron): https://build.nvidia.com

Nemotron on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/nvidia

Open Router: https://openrouter.ai

Kari's previous Neuron episode (Oct 2025): https://youtu.be/p0INn_w7TYo

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, and AR glasses. If you want to see a concrete example of AI agents working in the physical world to solve material science constraints, do not miss this conversation.

🔗 Learn more about SES AI: https://www.ses.ai/
🔗 Follow the Molecular Universe project: https://molecular-universe.com/about

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