My reviewing style has changed over time. Rather than litigate every little thing, and pushing my own ideas, I focus only on 2 things: (1) Are the claims interesting/important? (2) Does the evidence support the claims? Most of my reviews these days are short and focused.

Watson was a racist who, "near the end of his life, faced condemnation and professional censure for offensive remarks, including saying Black people are less intelligent than white people"

I was very honoured to receive the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering from His Majesty King Charles III this week, and pleased to hear his thoughts on AI safety as well as his hopes that we can minimize the risks while collectively reaping the benefits.

I’m looking for interns to join our lab for a project on foundation models in neuroscience. Funded by @ivado.bsky.social and in collaboration with the IVADO regroupement 1 (AI and Neuroscience: ivado.ca/en/regroupem...). Interested? See the details in the comments. (1/3) 🧠🤖

I’m looking for interns to join our lab for a project on foundation models in neuroscience. Funded by @ivado.bsky.social and in collaboration with the IVADO regroupement 1 (AI and Neuroscience: ivado.ca/en/regroupem...). Interested? See the details in the comments. (1/3) 🧠🤖

The future of Canadian research

Maybe I'm in the minority of neuroscientists, but I'm deflationary about terms like intelligence. If AI passes tests that were designed to measure these things, then we can say they have them (like we do for humans). And this is mostly what the original article says (the headline is inaccurate)

Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +

Can’t agree more. Still trying to wrap my head around the budget news. I want to move on, but honestly can’t. Yes, there’s some self-interest here, but adding another well-established researcher to an already deprived funding landscape isn’t exactly encouraging.

If we’re talking about ‘generational investment’, Canada needs faculty positions for postdocs. There have been virtually no cog psych/neuro jobs in the past three years.

Quite astounding that we are still pushing this kind of program, despite the Bouchard report and all the numerous stories of ‘stars’ coming from abroad who come to Canada, but keep their former lab, and then go back after 5 years because Canada is too cold or whatever.

Here's an interesting new study exploring whether LLMs are able to understand the narrative sequencing of comics and... even the best AI models are *terrible* at it for pretty much all tasks that were analyzed aclanthology.org/2025.finding...

Came here to see if I was interpreting this correctly. Seems like I am.

Francis Crick's book The astonishing Hypothesis drw me into the field of neuroscience. He made huge contributions. but worth remembering... 1/n

The only reason to violate the confidentiality of peer reivew is to undermine it. The only reason to demand this kind of information is to abuse it.

This is super cool!

We managed to integrate brain scans into LLMs for interactive brain reading and more.. check out Vicky's post below. Super excited about this one!

Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language. tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬 1/n

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

I wrote a thing on episodic memory and systems consolidation. I hope you all enjoy it and/or find it interesting. A neural state space for episodic memories www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪

Great Blueprint from @arnaghosh.bsky.social on our newest paper on representational geometry! tl;dr: we find that during pretraining LLMs undergo consistent cycles of expansion/recuction in the dimensionality of their representations & these cycles correlate with the emergence of new capabilities.

LLMs are trained to compress data by mapping sequences to high-dim representations! How does the complexity of this mapping change across LLM training? How does it relate to the model’s capabilities? 🤔 Announcing our #NeurIPS2025 📄 that dives into this. 🧵below #AIResearch #MachineLearning #LLM

Canadian researchers should be aware the there is a motion before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Research to force Tricouncils to hand over disaggregated peer review data on all applications: Applicant names, profiles, demographics Reviewers names, profiles, comments, and scores

Cool interpretability work from @anthropic.com transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introsp... Though it takes some effort to work through without getting bogged down by the loaded terminology, starting with "introspection" itself. #MLSky 🧠🤖

Important paper on LoRA vs full fine-tuning for continual learning: arxiv.org/abs/2410.21228 Although LoRA restricts weight updates to a low-dimensional subspace, which should reduce forgetting and be better suited for continual learning, this paper shows it may not actually be the case. #MLSky

Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s4...

For obvious reasons… congrats @yoshuabengio.bsky.social

If you’re going to post a paper on twitter, why not do it a few days after the bluesky post? No harm to your career but makes clear it’s a slower information source

Cool paper. Let’s do a journal club on it.

Populism is an adversarial attack to human cognition and decision making. Adversarial training could create some robustness.

If populism is (as this argues) a rebellion against System 2 thinking—which requires symbols and remains frustratingly hard for most of us—it seems we’re stuck with it forever. If only we could make some kind of, idk, cognitive prosthesis for symbolic reasoning? Yeah, never mind. Sounds hard. +

How does our brain excel at complex object recognition, yet get fooled by simple illusory contours? What unifying principle governs all Gestalt laws of perceptual organization? We may have an answer: integration of learned priors through feedback. New paper with @kenmiller.bsky.social! 🧵

Super cool work

🕳️🐇 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙍𝙖𝙗𝙗𝙞𝙩 𝙃𝙪𝙡𝙡 – 𝙋𝙖𝙧𝙩 𝙄 (𝑃𝑎𝑟𝑡 𝐼𝐼 𝑡𝑜𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑟𝑜𝑤) 𝗔𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗱𝗲𝗲𝗽 𝗱𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗗𝗜𝗡𝗢𝘃𝟮, one of vision’s most important foundation models. And today is Part I, buckle up, we're exploring some of its most charming features. :)

🕳️🐇Into the Rabbit Hull – Part II Continuing our interpretation of DINOv2, the second part of our study concerns the *geometry of concepts* and the synthesis of our findings toward a new representational *phenomenology*: the Minkowski Representation Hypothesis

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity! We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have: (1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs) (2) better hand dexterity (3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

Still moving fast and breaking things, but “things” now includes the people who kept things from breaking.

Sometimes I see a great post from someone on the other side and rush over here hoping they cross-posted it, only to find their last post here was months ago. I get if you don’t want to leave X, but please cross-post.

Are you looking to do independent research related to machine learning and/or data science? Want to get some teaching experience too? Apply to be a faculty fellow at the Center for Data Science at New York University! Positions are for two years. apply.interfolio.com/174686

Want to make publication-ready figures come straight from Python without having to do any manual editing? Are you fed up with axes labels being unreadable during your presentations? Follow this short tutorial including code examples! 👇🧵

Also if you believe AGI is more than 5-10 years away (or it doesn’t mean anything), then the massive tech company debt being accumulated to build data centers is clearly the most important thing around which everything else revolves.

Karpathy with his usual sober takes on today’s AI. www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-kar... #MLSky

Most robots will not be humanoid. The future of robots is an automated logistics and distribution system that can bring stuff from a container ship to your house, all with minimal intervention; and the robots involved are often huge and inhuman. itcanthink.substack.com/p/how-robots...

As much as I enjoy seeing the technical progress (the sensorimotor control needed for this 🤯), I can’t ignore the parallels with trying to reclaim streets from cars.

A year ago these things could just shuffle along slowly and would fall down if you looked at them wrong

In a thoughtfully written essay for @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social, neuroscientist Patrick House weaves together a narrative of lyrebirds, alpine parrots, shyness, curiosity, the uniquely human activity of pointing a finger, and the scientific method.

Excellent funding opportunity: $100k/year for two years for a postdoc position in Montreal. Apply if you're interested in joining Montreal's thriving #NeuroAI ecosystem.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT📣: I haven’t been this excited to be part of something new in 15 years… Thrilled to reveal the passion project I’ve been working on for the past year and a half!🙀🥳 (thread 👇)

I have open positions for graduate students in my lab. If you’re interested in joining, please apply through the Mila form. I’m particularly interested in (thread below): 1/3 🧠🤖 #MLSky

When I was an undergrad, I saw a talk by Oliver Sacks about music. During the Q&A, someone asked Sacks if he thought science would reveal the deepest mysteries of art. Sacks (a rare humanist among scientists) said that he doubted it, at which Eric Kandel (the host) leaped up and grabbed the mic.