TWiST 500 interviews with Cortical Labs, Turing, AND Mercor | E2159

Today’s show:

Alex is back with three more awesome interviews with founders on the bleeding edge of innovative tech.

• Dr. Hon Weng Chong walks us through the basics of biological computing and Cortical Labs’ first-ever commercial computer running on living human cells.
• Turing founder Jonathan Siddarth unpacks the secrets of LLM benchmarking, and explains why even our most advanced tests need to get much much harder right away.
• Finally, Mercor founder Brendan Foody on how AI is about to reinvent the hiring process, and marrying the effectiveness of recruiters with the ease of online job boards.

It’s three — count ’em, three — can’t miss TWiST interviews guaranteed to make you smarter

Timestamps:

(0:00) OpenAI’s GPT-5: When is it coming out? Is it going to be TOO smart?

(08:06) Cortical Labs’ Hon Weng Chong on the electric connection between neuroscience and machine learning

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(11:27) Show Continues…

(15:17) The extreme difficulty of going from the lab to a shippable product

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(21:05) Show Continues…

(28:15) Why data is a factor of time

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(31:16) Show Continues…

(42:44) Turing CEO Jonathan Siddarth explains why it’s so important to keep benchmarking our LLMs

(47:24) What it means when a model “saturates” a test, and why benchmarks need to get HARDER

(50:22) What happens with the LLMs can answer all of our smartest questions?

(53:44) AI Agents train in gyms? Wait, really?

(01:01:33) Coding teaches models how to think, and more training mysteries don’t understand

(01:03:11) Brendan Foody from Mercor explains the “matching problem” that makes hiring such a pain

(01:07:02) How Mercor combines a job board’s distribution with the value of a recruitment agency

(01:10:49) Brendan recalls building his first AI interviewer in his college dorm

(01:20:16) Mercor has the opposite of a retention problem and crazy growth

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Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta,