Show Notes
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 by co-locating memory and processing, communicating with light, and mimicking some of the high-connectivity dynamics found in biological brains.
In this conversation, Jeff breaks down why today’s chips can struggle with fast, multimodal inference; why transformers may be powerful but inefficient for some future workloads; how Great Sky’s system differs from quantum computing; and why early applications could include fusion reactors, particle physics, video understanding, content moderation, and eventually new model architectures that do not map neatly onto today’s hardware.
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More from The Neuron: AI Explained
Neurosurgeon-scientists Alex Ksendzovsky and Jon Pomeraniec explain how The Biological Computing Company uses living neurons as a research platform for AI. Their team grows roughly 150,000 cells on a 4,096-electrode array, sends in patterns such as handwritten digits, records how the neurons respond, and models useful computational behaviors in software. They say those neuron-inspired techniques are already helping GPU-based video-generation systems run about 5x faster with roughly 80% lower inference cost, while their longer-term work explores robots, world models, and real-time biological compute.
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Corey and Grant sit down with Mammoth Biosciences co-founder and CEO Dr. Trevor Martin to explain how CRISPR is moving from a laboratory tool toward one-time medicines.