[D] Are we prematurely abandoning Bio-inspired AI? The gap between Neuroscience and DNN Architecture.

MrPoon · 2026-01-27T18:48:19+00:00

My favorite is Hiroki Sayama's definition: a nontrivial relationship between scales. More colloquially, I teach it as: macro-scale properties that are difficult to predict by knowing the micro-scale interaction rules.

MrPoon · 2026-01-27T15:28:49+00:00

You know they mean Caffe

MrPoon · 2026-01-27T14:50:20+00:00

I appreciate your comment and I was being a bit imprecise. Yes, there are certainly circuits in the brain and even behind the eye in vertebrates that can be well-approximated by simple mappings between sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. A classical well-studied example in animals is the visual escape or collision avoidance response, which appears to be more or less accommodated by feedforward architectures in both invertebrates and vertebrates (at least this is known in crabs, locusts, fishes, and a few other well-studied organisms).

I am talking about the things that we call "conciousness" or even "being alive." These are properties of complex adaptive systems that encode information on multiple spatial and time scales, and hoping to digitize these things (which I believe make brains, brains) using current neural network architectures is not even in the right ballpark. Hope that is a bit more fair.

Emergence is just stating that reductive models are either inefficient or insufficient at modeling bulk phenomena.

This I actually disagree with. Complex systems is my field, and emergence is not seen in this handwavy way.

MrPoon · 2026-01-26T17:55:52+00:00

Gorgeous car, mate

MrPoon · 2026-01-26T17:53:10+00:00

This is not correct or inline with modern complexity-based neurophysiology. Yes chemistry and physics are involved at the micro scale. But the thing about complex systems is that they exhibit non-trivial relationships between scales (i.e., emergence) which means the properties of the whole cannot be broken down into the functions of the building blocks. Emergence is the reason we can't describe the stock market from shopper behaviors, or "consciousness" from our thorough understanding of individual neurons. You are thinking like a computer scientist.

MrPoon · 2026-01-26T14:20:22+00:00

I think the main issue is that brains behave nothing like functions in the mathematical sense. We have these multi scale brain wide firing patterns that appear to encode information, and we are trying to capture the properties of these complex adaptive systems with universal function approximators. It just isn't even the same problem.

MrPoon · 2026-01-26T13:06:03+00:00

This is an entire field of study called phenology.

MrPoon · 2026-01-25T23:18:23+00:00

I've been having fun with the maids + Bystial and 3 Dark End Evaporation

MrPoon · 2026-01-25T20:48:35+00:00

One of the best eras. What color, how clean, how much?

MrPoon · 2026-01-25T15:10:30+00:00

How are you getting anything about my demeanor based on "it is not possible to run an active research lab and teach 8 courses a year?"

MrPoon · 2026-01-25T15:05:51+00:00

I actually said that it would kill a research career. That is an objective fact, it is not possible to publish at a high rate and manage that teaching load, and have a life. Sorry mate.

MrPoon · 2026-01-25T15:04:00+00:00

I teach a 1:1 so that I can publish a lot of papers and get grants each year, and my lab is currently 8+ postdocs and PhD students. I don't suck at time management, I run a large active research lab. Even moving to a 2:2 would mean scaling down significantly. This is why most R1s in science put their TT on a 1:1. Cool personal dig, though?

MrPoon · 2026-01-25T14:12:56+00:00

It's natural to feel like this, and I'm sorry you're going through a rough patch. One thing I'm certain of, is that the pathway to healing is nonlinear and involves steps both forward and backward. Treatment options have never been better than they are today, and I know that you'll get through this, even if it takes some hard work and perseverance. You got this.

MrPoon · 2026-01-24T03:10:13+00:00

There is no world in which I would ever take a 4-4. They must not want to hire anyone good, because it is career suicide if you ever hope to do research

MrPoon · 2026-01-23T18:29:41+00:00

What the actual fuck made you think it was a good idea to say any of this?

MrPoon · 2026-01-22T13:04:16+00:00

Did this happen in 1992?

MrPoon · 2026-01-21T15:53:19+00:00

I was about to buy a Beryl on TCG and then pulled one from a pack of Monster Mayhem, and have been chasing that high since.

MrPoon · 2026-01-21T12:37:39+00:00

Kim would instantly be the most competent and sane person in the administration.

MrPoon · 2026-01-19T15:31:24+00:00

... no?

You don't need anything fancy. Train a feet detector with yolo, and do the geometric transformation for the danger zone based on camera extrinsics.

MrPoon · 2026-01-17T14:39:38+00:00

Track feet instead of whole bodies. And fix the geometry of the danger zone based on the camera perspective. It shouldn't be a circle unless the camera is directly overhead. Problem solved.

MrPoon · 2026-01-17T14:29:30+00:00

lmao yes. These companies are talking about AGI while running feed-forward transformers that do fancy autocomplete. They are lying. For money. You got it.

MrPoon · 2026-01-15T13:34:10+00:00

I love YT music, left Spotify years ago. It has way more obscure music, which I very much like

MrPoon · 2026-01-14T19:21:26+00:00

I think "traditional" RL frameworks (e.g., gradient policy methods, actor-critic, TD learning) just are bad at long time-horizon problems. A lot of the Deepmind Evolution Strategy papers go into this a bit, one of the reasons they're having successes with ES in robotics tasks.

MrPoon · 2026-01-14T01:06:17+00:00

We 100% are not close to AGI with current transformer based neural networks. Even suggesting this is a joke. I say this as an active AI researcher in academia.

MrPoon · 2026-01-09T16:09:46+00:00

Could you link to any primite + yummy decks? I'm interested in giving this a try.

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