Jesus Christ.

1/ 🚨 New preprint! 🚨 Excited and proud (& a little nervous 😅) to share our latest work on the importance of #theta-timescale spiking during #locomotion in #learning. If you care about how organisms learn, buckle up. 🧵👇 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 💻 code + data 🔗 below 🤩 #neuroskyence

#AGIComics now has a website! And it is 100% vibe coded! Check out agicomics.net

12 leading neuroscientists tackle a big question: Will we ever understand the brain? Their reflections span philosophy, complexity, and the limits of scientific explanation. www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/blog/wil... Illustration by @gilcosta.bsky.social & @joanagcc.bsky.social

🎯

Hmm…I don’t think it’s impossible. Evolution could create structures in the brain that are in correspondence with structure in the world.

This paper turned up on a feed, I was intrigued by it and started reading... ..but then I was quite baffled because our CSCG work seem to have tackled many of these problems in a more general setting and it's not even mentioned! So I asked ChatGPT... ...I'm impressed by the answer1. 1/🧵

Wow, very cool to see this work from Alla Karpova's lab. She had shown me the results when I visited @hhmijanelia.bsky.social and I was blown away. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘄𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗮 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗼𝗻'𝘀 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲? We introduce the idea of "importance" in terms of the extent to which a region's signals steer/contribute to brain dynamics as a function of brain state. Work by @codejoydo.bsky.social elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

It's kinda obvious. #AGIComics has already figured out which brain region is the most important. 😇

ohh...yes...this is exactly what I think after reading some of the "deep research" reports. ....written by a committee

jumping on the Gemini 2.5 bandwagon... it's an incredible model. really feels like an(other) inflection point. talking to Claude 3.7 feels like talking to a competent colleague who knows about everything, but makes mistakes. Gemini 2.5 feels like talking to a world-class expert with A+ intuitions

Give me 10 billion dollars and I’ll do it. 1 billion for developing the hardware and 9 billion to pay for my opportunity cost 😇

Nope. It is an engineering problem. Give me an algorithm you think is not being scaled because of a hardware mismatch, I can make the hardware (chip + interconnect + datacenter) given enough money. Purely an engineering problem.

ok...in that case which other existing model would you make a bet on scaling up? Pick one. I'd be happy to raise money for it.

This is great....this is a hypothesis. What other such hypotheses are there? Is there a space of such hypotheses, or is this just one? (Also, how does this match with Konrad's @kordinglab.bsky.social argument about being hypothesis-free?)

But why would you stop there? Why aren't you convinced this is how it works? It's SOTA on all the tasks.... You are not convinced because it doesn't match some brain data?

Here's my Q to @kordinglab.bsky.social who argues brain is too complex to understand.... How do you know that current systems AI are NOT how the brain works?

Wait... so you think brain is NOT a large transformer? How do you know that? The current empirical studies strongly support the idea that brain is a large transformer.....

TLDR: We need large amounts of data to finally show that brain is a large transformer that we cannot understand. 😇😝

The bitter lesson is that neuroscience seems to be out of ideas... 😇

Although Konrad is being brief here, the idea that “ANN are now often part of normative models and they are definitely SOTA” is something I see often. Including a component that is sota elsewhere doesn’t make a model any better. It is very possible to build sucky models with ANN.

If it doesn’t work, it’s called a normative model. Otherwise it’s a just a model. 😇

This research is "nonsense". The reviewers and editors that let this pass should be "ashamed".

This remains important today. As industry places huge financial bets on large language models, the research community needs to investigate other approaches that may achieve similar or better results via entirely different methods. end/

Hmm…why is that odd? or maybe this is similar to the point I make here, but coming from the other direction? blog.dileeplearning.com/p/amelia-bed...

we're advertising 2-3 postdoctoral positions to work at NYU on artificial consciousness and related topics at the intersection of AI and the philosophy of mind (possibly including AI mentality, AI interpretability, and AI welfare). deadline is march 30! philjobs.org/job/show/28878

This is horrible to post, but I may as well post it. We are essentially shutting down research operations in my group, which is focused on treatments for pediatric brain cancer. I’m a well funded investigator, and there’s no choice. Science can’t function without the stability of NIH

I was not ok with calling balloons "flying machines" either...I wanted to call them "floating machines", but the general public wanted to call it flying and that won out. 😇 blog.dileeplearning.com/p/welcome-to...

It was fun to visit Weinan's lab @sunw37.bsky.social at Cornell to give this talk. Exciting to see the experiments he's cooking up, and we had lots of fun discussions about PFC, hippocampus, consciousness and meditation! Part of the talk content is here: blog.dileeplearning.com/p/space-is-a...

wow...a post like this on LW? What's happening?

After reading this paper I feel like the rat in Ratatouille 😇

If there is a possibility that none of the critiques you make about theories of cognitive maps apply to our work , which is a contemporary theory of cognitive maps, then isn't that even more reason for you to engage with it? Is it that you aware of our work and found it irrelevant?

Since I do have a cognitive map theory, I read this paper with interest...but I don' get what the point is. Was the cognitive map idea vague initially ...yes. Has it become more concrete recently? Yes. Does it have a homunculus problem? Not really. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 1/

I’m excited about this collaborative project by @sunw37.bsky.social, @johanwinn.bsky.social, and many other talented contributors. Read about how our @hhmijanelia.bsky.social team imaged thousands of neurons in mouse hippocampus as mice learned cognitive tasks over several days: hhmi.news/4hXIp7r

Must-read for anyone interested in cognitive maps & the hippocampus.

Fantastic video explaining a study of hippocampal map formation.

Great fun!!!

1/12 How do animals build an internal map? In our new paper, we tracked thousands of mouse CA1 neurons over days/weeks as they learned a VR navigation task. @nspruston.bsky.social & co-1st author @johanwinn.bsky.social Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_4... Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

9/12 What do our findings reveal about hippocampal computation? We tested several models—but only Clone-Structured Causal Graph (CSCG) @dileeplearning.bsky.social matched the orthogonalized states and learning trajectory, highlighting hidden-state inference as a key learning principle.

Remove the word "brain". It's not adding any information. 😇

ouch.. @nathanieldaw.bsky.social is replacing his grad students with LLMs. 😇

And a reference implementation here l: github.com/vicariousinc...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... with more training details in supplement.

Fun fact: I sat on this paper for months before submitting because I was terrified of dealing with the review process. But then the reviews surprised me in a positive way.... I like this comment particularly because I drew most of the figures! :-)

Thanks @anilseth.bsky.social

A detailed theory of thalamic and cortical microcircuits for predictive visual inference www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... by @dileeplearning.bsky.social et al. via @wiringthebrain.bsky.social; #neuroscience

Well this looks awesome! 😀

Excited to dig into this one! We need to stop thinking of the thalamus as a simple "relay" system and realize it's a critical computational unit for cortical (and many subcortical) functions.

Happy to have this published …https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adr6698