MD, Entrepreneur, Tinkerer - Founder of Cortical Labs and CliniCloud | Forbes 30u30 | Tweets represent my personal views.
Melbourne, Victoria
Joined November 2008
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After seven years, I’ve resigned from Cortical Labs.
I’m proud of what we built, and grateful to everyone who was part of the journey — from an ambitious idea to something very real.
It’s been an extraordinary chapter.
I no longer have access to my Cortical Labs email, so if you’d like to stay in touch, please feel free to DM me here.
Onwards and upwards.
Hon Weng Chong retweeted
Curious to have watched numerous non-invasive “mind-reading, brain solving(?)” BCIs get funded, yet it’s unclear to me what has fundamentally been solved technologically that unlocks this capability. This is especially perplexing in EEG which categorically has very poor SNR and compliance challenges. I hope to be enlightened…
Hon Weng Chong retweeted
Anyone who thinks the following simple model:
y = f(dot(X, W) + B)
where X = input vector, W = weight matrix, f() = differentiable nonlinear activation for gradient backpropagation
captures the full complexity of real neurons needs to go back to school & learn the difference.
Hon Weng Chong retweeted
The latest hot thing from Silicon Valley: Unfalsifiability!
Stop participating in annoying debates that revolve around pesky inconveniences like “logic” or “truth”…
Instead, try the millenia old playbook of religious authority!
Declare yourself part of a gnostic priesthood, with insights only you and select few have the ability or anointing to see.
Cosy up to the executive authority who have the guns and prisons in exchange for your money and blessing and conferred legitimacy.
Make threats to conform under penalty of unemployment or social ostracism.
Promise forms of eternal damnation (permanent underclass) for differential thinking.
Assume everyone else is too stupid to understand why we should change the basis of society because of your spurious and fragile multiplications of tiny probabilities; especially over time horizons filled with infinite correlations and interactions that can’t possibly be accounted for.
Have no other life experiences nor give yourself time to understand nuance or love or pain or sex or culture. Note that it’s particularly important to spend all your time in front of an approved laptop with the approved apps in an approved faux-designer space, with all your accessories from influencers chasing the same kind of faux, engineered emptiness. When you do go out, go to a converted warehouse to do Hyrox or CrossFit. Whatever you do, don’t let sunlight touch your skin.
Essential: Never say anything testable. Never use deduction. Never consider your preconceptions.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Whatever can be tested, must be tested.
Hon Weng Chong retweeted
"Computational simulations generally lack the causal powers and intrinsic properties of the things being simulated. A simulation of the digestive system does not actually digest anything. A simulation of a rainstorm does not make anything actually wet. If we simulate a living creature, we have not created life. In general, a computational simulation of X does not bring X into being — does not instantiate X — unless X is a computational process (specifically, an algorithm) itself. Making the point from the other direction, the fact that X can be simulated computationally does not justify the conclusion that X is itself computational.
In most cases, the distinction between simulation and instantiation is obvious and uncontroversial. It should be obvious and uncontroversial for consciousness, too. A computational simulation of the brain (and body), however detailed it may be, will only give rise to consciousness if consciousness is a matter of computation. In other words, the prospect of instantiating consciousness through some kind of whole-brain emulation, at some arbitrarily high level of detail, already assumes that computational functionalism is true. But as I have argued, this assumption is likely wrong and certainly should not be accepted axiomatically.
This brings us back to the poverty of the brain-as-computer metaphor. If you think that everything that matters about brains can be captured by abstract neural networks, then it’s natural to think that simulating the brain on a digital computer will instantiate all its properties, including consciousness, since in this case, everything that matters is, by assumption, algorithmic. This is the “Turing world” view of the brain."
noemamag.com/the-mythology-o…
Would love to know how AU Gov would have responded to if instead of OpenAI, a Chinese model hacked Medicare.
Made it in Time
TIME’s new cover: Announcing the 2026 TIME100 AI, the world's most influential people in artificial intelligence time.com/collection/time100-…
Hon Weng Chong retweeted
TIME’s new cover: Announcing the 2026 TIME100 AI, the world's most influential people in artificial intelligence time.com/collection/time100-…
Hon Weng Chong retweeted
Treat your body like a data center
Consume as much water and literature as possible
Upset local city council with your existence
I wish there was a way to know when a VC invested in a specific company. You never know if a logo on a website came from true conviction at the start or just a secondary purchase to get a logo on.
Just been playing Campaign Evolved and while the mechanics and gameplay have mostly been kept the same as the original Halo from 2001, it is still a lot more fun to play than all the new stuff coming out.
Had a great time chatting with @Yang_Supertramp while visiting him in Shanghai - open.spotify.com/episode/53g…
Also venture seems to really have degenerated to SPV squatting and trading. What ever happened to deep conviction and carry?
Hon Weng Chong retweeted
Groq Founder @JonathanRoss321 explains why all the West Coast VCs missed on investing in Groq:
“Typical West Coast VCs are more like lemmings. Ttypical East Coast VCs all think that they're smarter than each other.”
“So when you try and raise from the West Coast, if one VC puts money in, all the others want to put money in.”
“In New York, one VC investing means nothing. They're going to run their own analysis. They do not care what other VCs are doing.”
“The flip of that is, if you're on the West Coast and one VC passes, they're going to go tell every other VC, and like lemmings, they're all going to pass as well.”
“All the VCs on the West Coast didn't want to invest in us. We had very few of the typical VCs invest in us at the end. We had a bunch of crossover funds from the East Coast investing.”
A conversation with @JonathanRoss321, founder of @GroqInc. This is the first podcast that Jonathan talks about his $20 billion partnership with NVIDIA.
In this conversation, we talk about his decade building Groq: why West Coast VCs kept passing on the company, how fast Jensen works, overcoming near-death experiences, and why he thinks the entire AI age turns on a single skill — knowing what to ask.
Hope you enjoy this conversation:
0:00 The $20 Billion NVIDIA Deal Closed In 3 Weeks
0:25 Why GPUs And LPUs Are Better Together
1:46 When AI Talks To AI, Speed Wins
3:30 Always Start With A Hobby Project
5:55 Ask The Right Questions, Not Answer Them
8:23 There Are Infinite Ways To Be A Leader
13:00 I Was One Of The World's Worst Leaders
14:34 Fewer Constraints, More Room To Surprise You
16:31 At NVIDIA There Is No Politics
19:44 You Have To Learn Confidence
22:23 East Coast VCs Think, West Coast VCs Follow
23:50 The Keynesian Beauty Contest Of Silicon Valley
26:48 The Autonomy That Created The NVIDIA Deal
30:07 Making A Model Smarter By Making It Faster
34:52 Reality Quotient Beats Intelligence Quotient
35:44 Find The Dominant Game And Play It
37:11 A Founder's Job Is Full-Time Change Management
38:34 Return On Luck: Seize It Better Than Anyone
42:54 You Can't Sell Speed, You Have To Let People Try It
46:32 I Intend To: Intentional Leadership
51:07 Groq Bonds: Trading Salary For Survival
54:13 Hire For Negatives, Grow For Positives
58:46 Loss Aversion And Booking The Win Early
1:00:37 How Michael Jordan Weaponized Humiliation
1:03:13 Manufactured Discontent Drives Everything
1:05:02 Every Day Without Compute Has A Real Cost
1:07:07 Code Was Rationed, Now It's Nearly Free
1:10:04 Teach Kids To Ask Questions, Not Answer Them
Includes paid partnerships.
What an amazing accomplishment @vytalow ! Very proud of this milestone and we at Cortical Labs will be ready to support you on your journey @ParasmaAI
Training human brain cells for compute got me into the @ycombinator S26 batch!
Solve really hard problems and change the world
I am also looking to grow the team, if you love RL leave a comment and DM me so I see it!
Hon Weng Chong retweeted
A Gila monster bites once and lives off the meal for weeks. In the 1990s someone asked how its blood sugar stays flat that long.
The answer became exenatide, the first GLP-1 drug, and the straight line that runs to Ozempic and Mounjaro.
Same story with CRISPR. It came out of the immune defenses of bacteria in yogurt and cheese, found by scientists studying why cultures sometimes fail.
The two biggest tools in modern medicine started as curiosity about a lizard and a dairy bug. The next big breakthrough is out there now, looking useless.
Two of the most important biomedical breakthroughs came from science of the Gila lizard venom (GLP-1s) and yogurt (CRISPR genome editing).
"The system that turned that lizard into a medicine is now being dismantled."
"Less support for scientists means strange questions no one will get to chase."
gift link nytimes.com/2026/06/20/opini…
