Thoughts on the Brain & AI
An essay in ‘The Transmitter’ on the role of genes and physics in brain wiring. When is it useful to understand this type of self-organization as a mechanism in brain development? Brain organoids that develop from induced pluripotent stem cells into patterned brain structures are sometimes described as beautiful examples of self-organization. But where is the mechanistic insight in this?…
There is an exciting, increasing interest of the neuromorphic computing community in the development of biological neural networks and The Self-Assembling Brain. Recent invited lectures include the International Conference for Neuromorphic Computing and Engineering (Aachen, 2024), and the International Workshop on Reliable and Systainable Neuromorphic Hardware (York, 2025), with production of a mindmap during the introductory keynote: Next opportunity to…
Following a keynote lecture at the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society meeting in Bogota, Columbia, in Novermber 2024, the Society invited a webinar on the topic of ‘Neurobiology of Artificial Intelligence’. The webinar took place on Dec. 12, 2024 and is now available online!
Michael Gaze (1927-2012) was a contemporary of Roger Sperry who went in search of the rules of brain wiring. Inspired by Sperry, Gaze tested the core ideas of the field using electrophysiology to map connectivity – and described just how relative positioning, as opposed to Sperry’s rigid code, can lead to synaptic specificity in the visual system. Never as famous…
Geoffrey Hinton is both a founding father and visionary critic of current approaches to AI. He has repeatedly been thoughtful about the lessons the field may learn from biology. He has also clearly spelled out fundamental limits to the currently most successful approaches of software-based learning methods that do not require prior information in the hardware. In his new preprint…
In his book ‘The Myth of Artificial Intelligence’ Erik Larson makes the argument that there is no known instance of any known type of intelligence producing something more intelligent than itself. Of course, past failure need not predict future failure. Unless there is a fundamental roadblock. So, let’s explore what can produce intelligence, shall we? The futurist’s notion remains that…
Babies are not born with randomly connected brains and turned on to learn. And yet, 100 years ago, neurobiologists were not so sure. In fact, most of them rather liked the idea, because they disliked the alternative: the development of intelligent brains without learning – as if embryo development could determine who you are. 100 years ago, neurobiologists had only…
The German newpaper Frankfurther Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) has published the article ‘Was der Künstlichen Intelligenz zum menschlichen Gehirn fehlt’ both in print and online (paywalled, unfortunately). It translates to ‘What AI is missing to become a human brain’. Similar English articles can be found here at The Self-Assembling Brain and at Princeton University Press.
You can describe a digital image by describing the coordinate and color of every individual pixel, meaning each of the smallest component ‘dots’ that together make up the picture. Since pictures taken with modern cell phones and cameras have an ever increasing resolution, this leads to rather large image files to save and send to friends. Fortunately, most images can…
Yes, they did. MuZero was published just before Christmas 2020, and is arguably the most advanced artificial neural network based on reinforcement learning out there right now. Its predecessor, AlphaZero already had the ability to teach itself both chess and Go (another two-person zero-sum-game without random elements). AlphaZero beat world champions, but needed one important bit of information to learn:…