The Neuron: AI Explained

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.

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Channel Insider: https://channelinsider.com

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 is fundamentally changing, and how Every's small team manages to ship and maintain an entire suite of AI tools: Spiral (automatic style guides from your writing), Sparkle (AI writing cleanup with custom folders), Cora (AI research assistant, now on iOS), Monologue (AI-powered journaling with notes), and Proof (the agent-first document editor that broke the internet for a day), as well as their new to be revealed on Friday: Plus One (a hosted AI agent for Slack).

Whether you're a founder, developer, or just someone trying to understand what "agentic" actually means in practice—this conversation is the real-world playbook.

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Products mentioned:
• Every: https://every.to
• Spiral: https://spiral.computer
• Sparkle: https://sparkle.computer
• Cora: https://cora.computer
• Monologue: https://www.monologue.to/
• Proof: https://proofeditor.ai
• Plus One (the new one!): https://every.to/plus-one

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.

A Special Thank You To Our Sponsor For This Video: Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA. Learn more at https://dell.com/yourwaytoai

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 
• Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA: 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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