There is a great deal of interest in whether LLMs challenge Chomsky’s claim that human language acquisition requires some sort of innate inductive bias (e.g., some sort of universal grammar). aclanthology.org/2020.coling-... pemt.ru/wp-content/u... doi.org/10.1037/rev0...

Interesting Transmitter article by Brian DePasquale on what will be the effect of the increasingly widespread use of LLMs to code up research ideas in neuroscience. Includes a somewhat sceptical commentary from me. 😉

Interesting take about TokenMaxxing Can a TokenMaxxer company Rez-up smaller companies and candidates 😂. www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYK2...

Maybe I don’t get it, but I am not 100% on comparing LLMs simulating consciousness to computers simulating a hurricane. Simulations are abstractions with certain assumptions. However, if a system can emulate and predict every behaviour of another system, aren’t they functionally equivalent?

How fast agentic AI has changed our work is head-spinning and there's been a lot of debate in our lab. So we drafted guidelines to help navigate this new reality. Sharing here in the hope it’s useful for others & curious to hear thoughts schucklab.gitlab.io/ai-policy.html #AcademicSky #compneurosky

I see papers write "we use Euler" for integration in dynamical systems. Euler is inherently unstable for stable points that are center. It would be great to stress if one is using pure Euler or other modifications like Euler-Cromer or Verlet. I think this is an important detail in a papers methods.

Neuromatch has been denied our Office of Foreign Assets Control "Iran license" renewal. We had renewed successfully before, but now our request is “inconsistent with current U.S. foreign policy.” I am absolutely gutted by this denial.

At one point, research output will scale massively with compute.

If you're interested in doing a 2 year Schmidt "AI in science" postdoc fellowship in neuroscience/AI stuff with me starting in July or Oct 2027 take a look at this and get in touch soon. We've had a lot of luck recently getting these fellowships. www.imperial.ac.uk/electrical-e...

Idea for grant proposal formative assessment. Very short proposal (1 page say) and reviewers are each allowed 3 questions which you get a very limited character count to respond to. Overall effort hugely reduced and lets the proposal evolve within a round rather than needing resubmission. Thoughts?

Is it time to focus on Alignment? The rate of advancements of LLM is kind of scary. Though, I personally believe they might not lead us to human-like AGI, and I also don't advertise for them, still their rate of advancement in code databases and cybersecurity warrants caution.

Given yesterday’s news about Anthropic, this is an excellent talk from 2 weeks ago about how LLMs exploit 0-day vulnerabilities and how dramatically their capabilities have increased. youtu.be/1sd26pWhfmg?...

Will AI agents and automated editors be the first readers of your next academic journal submission? "The system makes preliminary evaluative judgments that humans then review. The human role shifts from doing the assessment to auditing the assessment." scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/04/08/a...

What are the chances that a hobbyist can solve this? 🤔 www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_xT...

In my opinion, the problem with LLM applications is the rate of change in the norm of coding and tools. Every now and then a new idea comes out that might offer benefits to your application at the cost of re-coding a "may be not so small" chunk of your application. www.youtube.com/watch?v=UabB...

Science would be so much better if we did review (of grants and papers) constructively and collaboratively, instead of only using them to produce binary accept/reject decisions. To do that, we have to separate review processes from decisions. One idea for grants 👇

Had great fun discussing some recent work and the value of toy models in neuroscience last night! Our next workshop will be: * 16.04 * 16-20:30 * At the Crick Sign up (for free) and come along! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/understand...

📣 We've extended the application deadline for #Neuromatch and #Climatematch Academy Students and Teaching Assistants by one week! 🚨 📅 New deadline: March 22, midnight in your local time. ➡️ Apply now: portal.neuromatchacademy.org/sign-in Tag someone who almost missed out! #TA #SummerSchool

Hot take: I prefer if subfields of machine learning not use the key-query terminology (as a mental state) in every possible chance. I think, it biases thinking towards a lower-D subspace and limits our ability to draw more general conclusions and analogies. For example, see contrastive learning.

On first thought, I have this feeling that Chaos and truly random events (like radioactive decay) will be provide predictive challenges to any artificial super intelligence.🤔

Is this the beginning? www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

I find this plot very telling about the current state of LLMs...maybe more parameters or engineering overheads will help? Source: arcprize.org/arc-agi/2/

I my opinion, I think embedding models need a little bit bigger share of the praise than is due compared to transformers. Whenever there is talk about LLMs most of the argument is warped around transformers, but I think without good embedding infrastructure, this would have been more difficult.

What is true? what is hype? What is an ad for AI? www.bbc.com/news/article...

I asked Chatgpt (the free version) about "an idea for a scientific paper I can work". Here is the first option from its answer 😆:

This might be a good test case as of why LLMs are not the answer: I tried using Scispace to do a literature review on the "role of visual experience in the development of visual feature maps". At one point it presented two theoretical frameworks for this topic: ........

"Stakeholders construct AI differently ... in ways that are useful to them ... and these differences have significant social and educational implications.” codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/01/16/c...

Maybe a not so smart take, but there are four types (or subtypes) of ON-OFF directionally selective retinal ganglion cell in mice, upward, downward, backward and forward (Sans and Mashland 2015). Yet, why didn't nature use an efficient 2-cell binary code for these directions? Nature makes me 🤪.

How many independent verifications are ok for a result (experimental hypothesis) to be adopted into other work? When I read a new interesting paper, I am always excited and worried. Excited about the prospects of the results and their potential, worried about the certainty/confidence of its claims.

Submissions (short!) due for SNUFA spiking neural networks conference in <2 weeks! 🤖🧠🧪 forms.cloud.microsoft/e/XkZLavhaJe More info at snufa.net/2025/ Note that we normally get around 700 participants and recordings go on YouTube and get 100s-1000s views. Please repost.

Seems plausible to me. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L1J...

The following article is now in press at Psychological Review. Interested to hear what people think! "The successes and failures of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) highlight the importance of innate linguistic priors for human language acquisition". osf.io/preprints/ps... via

I am just thinking about the benefits of investing "too" much on new Data centers in the age where breakthroughs might be just around the corner. I mean, who knows, maybe a new architecture that is more AI friendly (with the appropriate model of course) can emerge in the near future.

Is brain-wide distributed code at odds with temporal coding? 🤔 I don't know, this thought has been buzzing my brain lately.

If symbolic reasoning is the peak of the human cognitive evolution, then an AGI should not only reach this level, but evolve beyond and push through to the next level in the cognitive hierarchy.

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

Was my pleasure working on this project, a great avenue to discuss interesting ideas and make new connections.

I find the following sentence interesting: " Instead, the work of Hubel and Wiesel and the Nobel committee's recognition directed brain research along an overly narrow path for over 50 years." onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

I think a crucial project to undertake is to visually layout the human cortex in a friendly way (like a map with connections) at different levels of spatiotemporal details, while highlighting and summarizing relevant theories and hypotheses for the zoomed-on area. This is one of my dream projects.

It is thought that V1 complex cells are phase invariant because they integrate the activity of many simple cells. This is such a simple and easy mechanism to comprehend yet after 1000s of models and papers the visual cortex is still an enigma. I find this amusing.

Hot take of the year: I think for humanity to move forward, we need to amend our egoistic evolutionary heritage with a splash of altruistism. Maybe egoism is one of the ingredients for fast tracking intelligence, but maybe also, it is its own ceiling.

Why is it "What and Where" not "What or Where"? 🤔

A quote from the paper by Spillmann et. al. 2015: "Future research on extraclassical RF properties will have to include studies on processes of perceptual learning and memory. The temporal firing characteristics of neurons are critical in these processes (citations)....

A great paper that elaborates the interdependence between different types of weight classes and the task at hand. It also highlights the functional utility of each weight class.

Is there a proof that the visual cortex has equivariance transformations? It might be that equivariance of CNNs is an artificial property that is not available in the visual cortex? Maybe, equivariance is the property of kernels/filters stacked vertically and not arranged horizontally as in the VC?

I wrote a thing for @thetransmitter.bsky.social. The attack on scientific infrastructure happening in the US shows that relying on any one country is not a good option for science. We need to start supporting and building international, decentralised infrastructure for science.

"Redundancy is the part of our sensory experience that distinguishes it from noise" H.B. Barlow, from "Unsupervised learning 1989"

True 🤣. Source: Sarcasm on Facebook

Did intelligence arise from observing iid data or from data that is correlated in space & time? 🤔

One cannot simply retire from passion! www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lwE...