<p>What if the next big AI breakthrough is not a bigger model, but a completely different kind of computer?</p><p><br></p><p>Jeff Shainline, co-founder and CEO of Great Sky, joins <em>The Neuron</em> 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.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>Subscribe to <em>The Neuron</em> for grounded, practical conversations about where AI is going next—and what actually has to work before the hype becomes real. </p>