This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis covers startups, tech, markets, media, and all the hottest topics in business and technology. He also interviews the world’s greatest founders, operators, investors, and innovators.

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

Aug 1, 2025 • 84 mins

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

Key Points

Benchmarking and evaluating LLMs is crucial for identifying their strengths and weaknesses to generate data that improves their performance on useful tasks.
Cortical Labs is creating hybrid biologic and digital computers that can perform tasks with significantly less energy than traditional compute systems, opening new possibilities for real-time specific problems without large datasets.
Merkur aims to revolutionize the labor market by automating the matching process with AI, starting with high-skilled roles, and expanding to create a global unified labor market that increases efficiency and access for both candidates and companies.

Speakers

Jonathan Siddharth

Guest • 18%

Alex Wilhelm

Host • 33%

Lon Harris

Guest • 3%

Brendan Foody

Guest • 14%

Han Wangchong

Guest • 27%

Partners

Chapters

0:00	The importance of benchmarking LLMs
0:38	Sponsor: Northwest Registered Agent
1:01	Sponsor: AWS Activate
1:42	Introduction and Jason's absence; Upcoming interviews and GPT-5 discussion
5:49	Speculations on GPT-5 release
7:24	Introduction of founder interviews
8:11	Interview with Cortical Labs CEO Han Wangchong; Background on merging biology with computing
18:11	Challenges and market potential for commercializing the CL1 device
25:32	Advantages and future of biological computing
29:55	Sponsor mention: AWS Activate
31:16	Balancing human and machine intelligence; Future iterations and ethical considerations
37:30	Demand, logistics, and venture capital interest for the CL1
42:41	Meta's investment in Scale AI and implications for competitors
43:42	Introduction of guest Jonathan Siddharth from Turing; LLM evaluation and benchmarking
48:24	Private evaluations and Turing's approach to model improvement
51:05	The role of human experts in enhancing LLMs and creating reinforcement learning environments
57:10	The future of AI research and collaboration with human experts
1:02:18	Closing thoughts and Turing's hiring needs
1:03:07	Introduction of Brendan Foody and Merkur; Inefficiencies in the labor market
1:07:02	The vision for a centralized global labor market and focus on AI talent placement
1:09:20	How Merkur's platform works for candidates and companies; AI interview process
1:12:18	Multilingual capabilities, metrics for success, and impact on hiring and performance
1:19:53	Addressing the broader labor market, company growth, and future plans
1:22:27	Hiring shoutout and closing remarks

Transcript

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