The Neuron: AI Explained

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 how AI is helping them get there faster.
Brandon explains why fusion has been "30 years away" for decades, what changed with high-temperature superconducting magnets, and why fusion is fundamentally safer than fission (hint: fusion is "default off"). We dive into CFS's collaborations with Google DeepMind and NVIDIA, what it takes to wrangle 10,000 unique parts, and when we might actually see fusion on the grid.
You'll learn:
• What fusion actually is (and why it's not nuclear fission)
• Why high-temperature superconducting magnets changed everything
• How AI is accelerating plasma control and simulation
• The safety profile that makes fusion regulated like an MRI, not a reactor
• When CFS expects to hit Q > 1 (net energy) and beyond
To learn more about Commonwealth Fusion Systems, visit https://cfs.energy.
For more practical, grounded conversations on AI and emerging tech, subscribe to The Neuron newsletter at https://theneuron.ai

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, knowledge workers, and anyone trying to figure out how AI fits into their workflow.

What we'll cover:
🔥 Live demos – Logan will show us Gemini 3 Flash in action, from coding to multimodal understanding

⚡ What's now possible – Use cases that weren't practical with previous models (or weren't possible at all)

🛠️ Building together – We might wire up a tool live if Logan's game (we've got ideas)

💰 Intelligence too cheap to meter – We'll dig into the economics: when AI gets this powerful and this affordable, does it change the hiring calculus?

On that last point: right now, data shows AI is raising wages for AI-impacted roles because workers who use AI effectively can command higher salaries. But what happens when frontier intelligence costs $0.50 per million tokens? When does “intelligence as a commodity” flip from “AI makes workers more valuable” to “why hire a human?” We’ll see if we can get Logan’s take on this topic!

Key specs on Gemini 3 Flash:
Outperforms Gemini 2.5 Pro across most benchmarks

3x faster than 2.5 Pro

Less than 1/4 the cost of Gemini 3 Pro

1M token context window

Advanced visual and spatial reasoning with code execution
78% on SWE-bench Verified (agentic coding)

Rolling out globally in Gemini app, AI Mode in Search, and developer platforms

Logan has been at the center of Google's push to make frontier AI accessible to millions of developers. If you're shipping products, building with AI, or just trying to wrap your head around where this is all going, this conversation will give you clarity.

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 simplest mental model for diffusion: generate a full draft, then refine it by “fixing mistakes”

Why today’s autoregressive LLM inference is often memory-bound—and why diffusion can shift it toward a more GPU-friendly compute profile

Where Mercury wins today (IDEs, voice/real-time agents, customer support, EdTech—anywhere humans can’t wait)

What changes (and what doesn’t) for long context and architecture choices

The real-world way to evaluate models in production: offline evals + the gold-standard A/B test

Stefano also shares what’s next on Mercury’s roadmap—especially around stronger planning and reasoning for agentic use cases.

Try Mercury + learn more: inceptionlabs.ai

For more practical, grounded conversations on AI systems that actually work, subscribe to The Neuron newsletter at https://theneuron.ai.

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 experience platform that automates up to 90% of tickets with 99.8% accuracy — without sacrificing empathy, trust, or outcomes.

We cover:
• Why LLMs are the biggest shift in customer service since the telephone
• Why bolting AI onto old CX workflows fails
• How Crescendo’s multimodal AI can chat, talk, see images, and control devices in one conversation
• Real-world examples (like smart sprinkler troubleshooting via voice + vision + APIs)
• Why Crescendo combines AI agents with forward-deployed human experts
• How outcome-based pricing aligns incentives around real customer satisfaction
• How AI is reshaping (not eliminating) customer service jobs
• Why “deflection” is the wrong mindset for CX — and what replaces it
• What customer support roles look like in an AI-native future

This is a deep dive into the next generation of customer experience, where AI handles scale and speed — and humans deliver judgment, empathy, and innovation.

Subscribe for weekly conversations with the builders shaping the future of AI and work.

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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 (like the viral "Ralph Wiggum" method) that separate 10x engineers from 100x engineers. Whether you're a developer or AI-curious, you'll learn practical strategies for using AI coding tools more effectively.

🔗 Links:
• Gemini CLI: https://geminicli.com
• GitHub: https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli
• Subscribe to The Neuron newsletter: https://theneuron.ai