The Neuron: AI Explained

Humanoid robotics challenges go beyond movement and servo motors.

The hardest problems are often AI problems. Bringing intelligence into the physical world means dealing with gravity, friction, uncertainty, and real consequences. Mistakes can break hardware.

This week on Neuron Live, we’re joined by Nikita Rudin, Co-founder and CEO of Flexion Robotics, to unpack what it actually takes to build intelligence for humanoid systems.

What we’ll cover:
🤖 Training control policies and perception models
🧪 Bridging simulation and the real world (sim-to-real)
🛠️ Robotics training pipelines and the embodied AI stack
🔮 Where humanoid and physical AI is headed next

If large language models are the brain in the cloud, what does intelligence look like when it has to walk, grasp, and not fall over?

Expect a deep dive into embodied AI, physical AI, and the systems powering the next generation of humanoid robots.

Larry Meadows, Head of Product Strategy & Evangelism for HP's Workforce Experience Platform (WXP), joins us to break down how HP is using AI to predict and prevent IT problems before employees ever notice them.

We get a live demo of the platform—from AI-powered software recommendations across 50M+ devices to automated remediation in 3–4 clicks—and dig into the global memory crisis, shadow AI risks, and why IT leaders are drowning in portals.

Whether you manage a fleet of 50 devices or 50,000, this one's worth your time.

HP WXP: https://www.hp.com/wxp
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Confused by AI Skills, Projects, Gems, Custom GPTs, and Agents?

You're not alone. It's important to separate which is best for which use-case, because each has a place depending on what you're trying to get done.

In this beginner-friendly live episode, we break down what these AI terms actually mean, who creates them, and when everyday users should use each one.

Think of this as your plain-English map to the new AI assistant world:

✅ Projects = places to organize ongoing work
✅ Gems & Custom GPTs = reusable custom assistants
✅ Skills = reusable instructions and workflows
✅ Agents = AI systems that can take actions on your behalf

By the end of this live session, you'll understand the practical difference between creating a custom assistant, organizing work in a project, giving AI a repeatable skill, and letting an agent complete tasks for you.

What You'll Learn:
🔹 What an AI Skill is
🔹 What an AI Project is
🔹 What Google Gemini Gems are
🔹 What Custom GPTs are
🔹 What AI Agents are
🔹 Which one beginners should start with
🔹 The simple framework for choosing the right tool for your workflow

Get beginner-friendly AI explainers, practical tutorials, and daily updates on what matters in AI.

📩 Subscribe to our newsletter: https://www.theneuron.ai

AI can write code, pass exams, and summarize the web, but ask it to reason through a real-world image, and the magic often breaks. Andrew Dai, co-founder and CEO of Elorian, joins The Neuron to explain why visual reasoning may be one of the biggest unsolved problems in AI.

Andrew spent years at Google Brain and DeepMind, including work connected to Gemini and sparse mixture-of-experts systems. Now, he’s building Elorian around a simple but powerful idea: if AI is going to understand the physical world, it needs more than text-based reasoning layered on top of images.

In this episode, Corey and Grant talk with Andrew about why frontier models struggle with counting, navigation, design, engineering, charts, and physical reasoning; why scaling language models hasn’t solved vision; what a “visual chain of thought” might look like; and how better visual reasoning could accelerate robotics, satellite analysis, product design, and mechanical engineering.

Sponsored by Dell Technologies and NVIDIA. Learn more at techrepublic.com/hubs/the-enterprise-guide-to-scalable-ai/.

Sponsored by Outshift: Visit https://outshift.cisco.com/?utm_campaign=fy26q3_outshift_ww_paid-media_ioc-neuronai-outshift_podcast&utm_channel=podcast&utm_source=podcast to learn more about the Internet of Cognition.

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Live from Microsoft Build, Corey Noles sits down with Scott Hanselman for a hands-on Neuron LIVE episode about AI-augmented software development, how it differs from just "vibe coding", and the surprisingly practical things people can now build with tools like GitHub Copilot and more.

Scott is one of the best technical explainers in software: a longtime Microsoft and GitHub developer, teacher, speaker, author, blogger, and podcaster who has helped millions of developers understand new technology without making it feel impossible to learn.

This episode turned into a live demo tour of what AI coding can already do, led by Scott's own use-cases. Corey and Scott walked through a series of examples showing how AI can help people build useful apps, prototypes, workflows, and small tools from everyday ideas, including Scott's own vibe-coded tools Baby Smash (https://www.babysmash.com/), which lets babies press random buttons for fun shapes and sounds, and Tiny Tool Town (https://www.tinytooltown.com/), which showcases random, cool tools Scott found around the web.

But in the coolest demo of all, Scott shows how to take an open source tool and create software a personal blood sugar tracking app for his own diabetes management. If that doesn't get your idea blood flowing for what you can do with AI, we don't know what will!

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