Show Notes
In this episode, Cooper sits down with Neurometric CEO, Rob May, to talk through a big-news month: the show's rebrand from Inference Time Tactics to Token Engineering, the launch of tokenminning.com as a response to the "tokenmaxxing" trend, Neurometric's new token engineering platform and fundraising announcement. But the bigger conversation is about why Rob thinks "token engineering" is about to become a discipline every AI company needs—the same way DevOps or UX became non-negotiable roles—and why he's betting the company on getting there first.
We talked about:
The origin of tokenminning.com—started as an April Fools' joke and Reddit group—and why it caught fire as a real counterpoint to "tokenmaxxing." Specialized, fine-tuned models beat frontier models on individual tasks. New token engineering platform unifies fine-tuning, distillation, and caching in one system. COGS vs. OPEX: how Neurometric spots which customers feel AI costs most. Integrating with Harbor to run 15,000 agentic evaluation tasks across models like Gemma, Qwen, Mistral, and Granite. Token engineering is becoming a C-suite responsibility, not just an engineering one.
Resources Mentioned: Tokenminning Manifest: https://www.tokenminning.com/
Connect with Neurometric:Website: https://www.neurometric.ai/ Substack: https://neurometric.substack.com/ X: https://x.com/neurometricai/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/neurometric.bsky.social
Hosts: Calvin Cooper https://x.com/cooper_nyc_ https://www.linkedin.com/in/coopernyc
Rob May https://x.com/robmay https://www.linkedin.com/in/robmay
More from Token Engineering
In this episode of Token Engineering, Cooper sits down with Yash, Head of AI Research at Neurometric AI, to break down TMax from AI2 (Allen Institute for AI)—a fully open dataset and training recipe that pushes small open-weight models like Qwen to near-frontier performance on terminal agent tasks. The paper argues that diversity and difficulty matter more than where the data comes from—even when that data is entirely invented by Gemini rather than pulled from real-world code.
In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Cooper sits down with Yash Sharma, Head of AI Research at Neurometric AI, to break down the Pioneer Agent paper from Fastino Labs—a system that uses Claude Sonnet as an ML engineer in a box to build and improve small language models end-to-end. From cold start data curation to production failure diagnosis, the paper argues the real bottleneck in SLM creation isn't training—it's everything around it.
In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Cooper sits down with Fletcher Wimbush, CEO of Discovered AI, to get into what’s actually broken about hiring—and how 13 years of bootstrapped recruiting, 10,000 interviews, and four peer-reviewed journal articles became the foundation for a platform now outperforming its biggest competitors. With hundreds of applicants flooding every open role and general AI tools hitting the ceiling at 70-80% resume screening accuracy, Discovered is combining behavioral science with fine-tuned small language models to get hiring right the first time.
Every day billions of voice conversations happen across games, customer service calls, and financial transactions. Almost none of them are understood by machines. In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Calvin Cooper and Yash Sharma sit down with Carter Huffman, CTO and co founder of Modulate, to explore the AI systems that can finally understand voice conversations in real time.
In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Cooper and Byron sit down with Charlie and Anil from Rapt AI to tackle one of the industry's most expensive problems: GPU underutilization. With half a trillion dollars invested in GPU infrastructure running at just 20-30% utilization, Rapt AI is building AI-powered orchestration that automatically analyzes workloads and matches them to the right compute resources—no guesswork required.