Last month Dawkins declared Claude conscious and was mocked. @garymarcus.bsky.social cleverly called it The Claude Delusion. My (and Nagel's?) take: Both are wrong for the same reason. Here's why the question of machine consciousness will never be settled scientifically. arxiv.org/abs/2606.00226
Bradley Love
Bradley Love
@profdata.bsky.social
Senior research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Former UCL, UTexas, Alan Turing Institute, Ellis EU. CogSci, AI, Comp Neuro, AI for scientific discovery https://bradlove.org
4.3K followers808 following62 posts
Bradley Love reposted
Every time you experience something new, your brain faces a decision: Should it update an existing memory or create a new one? In our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social #JNeurosci, we isolate that exact decision, moment-by-moment during learning 🧵
Are you a graduate student interested in working at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) this summer? LANL has student internships, apply here: lanl.jobs/search/jobde... Please apply ASAP and before February 13th (sorry for the rush) 1/2
"The inevitability and superfluousness of cell types in spatial cognition". Intuitive cell types are found in random artificial networks using the same selection criteria neuroscientists use with actual data. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... 1/2
Intuitive cell types don't necessarily play the ascribed functional role in the overall computation. This is not a message the field wants to hear as it suggests better baselines, controls, and some reflection. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... 2/2
Exciting "new" work illustrating our broken publishing system. Seb presented this work online at neuromatch 2.0 at the height of the pandemic. Then, Xin-Ya worked years on addressing reviewer comments, which added some rigor but didn't change the message. 1/2
Working with monkey data, we found neural representations stretched across brain regions to emphasize task relevant features on a trial-by-trial basis. Spike timing mattered over spike rate. Deep nets did the same. nature.com/articles/s41... 2/2
When AI surpasses human performance, what's left for humans? We find that human judgment boosts performance of human-AI teams because humans and machines make different errors. cell.com/patterns/ful... 1/2
We developed a straightforward method of combining confidence-weighted judgments for any number of humans and AIs. w Felipe Yáñez, Omar Valerio Minero, @ken-lxl.bsky.social 2/2
Bradley Love reposted
Researchers are using LLMs to analyze the literature, brainstorm hypotheses, build models and interact with complex datasets. Hear from @mschrimpf.bsky.social, @neurokim.bsky.social, @jeremymagland.bsky.social, @profdata.bsky.social and others. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/machine-lear...
Bradley Love reposted
Michael X Cohen on why he left academia/neuroscience. mikexcohen.substack.com/p/why-i-left...
Some UK dude is trying to extort me, demanding money to not spread made-up stories. I reported to the poilice after getting flooded with phone messages I never listen to, etc. @bsky.app has been good about deleting his posts and accounts. If contacted, don't interact, but instead report to...1/2
moderation@blueskyweb.xyz, send to me, or send directly to the Met (London police) who are investigating www.met.police.uk. I could see this being super distressing for a vulnerable person, so hope this does not become more common. For me, it's been an exercise in rapidly learning to not care! 2/2
New blog w @ken-lxl.bsky.social, “Giving LLMs too much RoPE: A limit on Sutton’s Bitter Lesson”. The field has shifted from flexible data-driven position representations to fixed approaches following human intuitions. Here’s why and what it means for model performance bradlove.org/blog/positio...
New blog, "Backwards Compatible: The Strange Math Behind Word Order in AI" w @ken-lxl.bsky.social It turns out the language learning problem is the same for any word order, but is that true in practice for large language models? paper: arxiv.org/abs/2505.08739 BLOG: bradlove.org/blog/prob-ll...
"Probability Consistency in Large Language Models: Theoretical Foundations Meet Empirical Discrepancies" Oddly, we prove LLMs should be equivalent for any word ordering: forward, backward, scrambled. In practice, LLMs diverge from one another. Why? 1/2 arxiv.org/abs/2505.08739
When LLMs diverge from one another because of word order (data factorization), it indicates their probability distributions are inconsistent, which is a red flag (not trustworthy). We trace deviations to self-attention positional and locality biases. 2/2 arxiv.org/abs/2505.08739
Bonus: I found it counterintuitive that (in theory) the learning problem is the same for any word ordering. Aligning proof and simulation was key. Now, new avenues open to address positional biases, better training and knowing when to trust LLMs. w @ken-lxl.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2505.08739
"Coordinating multiple mental faculties during learning" There's lots of good work in object recognition and learning, but how do we integrate the two? Here's a proposal and model that is more interactive than perception provides the inputs to cognition. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Bradley Love reposted
Last year, we funded 250 authors and other contributors to attend #ICLR2024 in Vienna as part of this program. If you or your organization want to directly support contributors this year, please get in touch! Hope to see you in Singapore at #ICLR2025!
Financial Assistance applications are now open! If you face financial barriers to attending ICLR 2025, we encourage you to apply. The program offers prepay and reimbursement options. Applications are due March 2nd with decisions announced March 9th. iclr.cc/Conferences/...
Thanks @hossenfelder.bsky.social for covering our recent paper, doi.org/10.1038/s415... Also, I want to spotlight this excellent podcast (19 minutes long) with Nicky Cartridge covering how AI will impact science and healthcare in the coming years, touchneurology.com/podcast/brai...
Large Language Models were remarkably accurate in predicting results of studies that they’ve never read before. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgrl...
"Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results" w @ken-lxl.bsky.social and braingpt.org. LLMs integrate a noisy yet interrelated scientific literature to forecast outcomes. nature.com/articles/s41... 1/8
While BrainBench focused on neuroscience, our approach is science general, so others can adopt our template. Everything is open weight and open source. Thanks to the entire team and the expert participants. Sign up for news at braingpt.org 8/8
"Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results" w @ken-lxl.bsky.social and braingpt.org. LLMs integrate a noisy yet interrelated scientific literature to forecast outcomes. nature.com/articles/s41... 1/8
Indeed, follow-up work on teaming finds that joint LLM and human teams outperform either alone, because LLMs and humans make different types of errors. We offer a simple method to combine confidence-weighted judgements. arxiv.org/abs/2408.08083 6/8
"Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results" w @ken-lxl.bsky.social and braingpt.org. LLMs integrate a noisy yet interrelated scientific literature to forecast outcomes. nature.com/articles/s41... 1/8
There were no signs of leakage from the training to test set. We performed standard checks. In follow-up work, we trained an LLM from scratch to rule out leakage; even this smaller model was superhuman on BrainBench arxiv.org/abs/2405.09395 4/8
"Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results" w @ken-lxl.bsky.social and braingpt.org. LLMs integrate a noisy yet interrelated scientific literature to forecast outcomes. nature.com/articles/s41... 1/8
"Beyond Human-Like Processing: Large Language Models Perform Equivalently on Forward and Backward Scientific Text" Our take is that large language models (LLMs) are neither stochastic parrots nor faithful models of human language processing. arxiv.org/abs/2411.11061 1/2
Instead of viewing LLMs as models of humans or stochastic parrots, we view them as general and powerful pattern learners that can master a superset of what people can. arxiv.org/abs/2411.11061 2/2
Has anyone tried this tool to follow back all of one's followers? github.com/jiftechnify/... It seems legit but I'm weary of giving a password to a third party website. So many people here so suddenly!
Bradley Love reposted
I fully support the last sentence of this abstract from @profdata.bsky.social : elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... "...the complexity of the brain should be respected and intuitive notions of cell type, which can be misleading and arise in any complex network, should be relegated to history." 🧠📈 🧪
Bradley Love reposted
🚨Submissions for #CCN2024 are now open at ccneuro.org 🚨 We welcome submissions for 2-page papers (deadline: 12 April) and Generative Adversarial Collaborations (GACs), Keynote+Tutorials, and (new this year!) Community Events (deadline: 5 April). Stay tuned: registration will open in early April!
Here's a recent talk I gave on the braingpt.org project, touching on findings from here, arxiv.org/abs/2403.03230. The video is sectioned for those wishing to skip the bits on explanatory vs. predictive approaches. youtu.be/sDt4-Q_jz7g?...
Bradley Love reposted
📢 ERC-funded PhD in our team 📢. Curious about the mechanisms underlying learning and perception? Wish to study them via modelling and neuroimaging? This may be for you! Email me qus. Please circulate 🙏 www.findaphd.com/phds/project... #HiSciSky #neuroskyence #PsySciSky
"Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results" w @ken-lxl.bsky.social and braingpt.org. LLMs integrate a noisy yet interrelated scientific literature to forecast outcomes. arxiv.org/abs/2403.03230 1/6
There were no signs of leakage from the training to test set. Our approach is science general, so others can adopt our template. Open source. Thanks to the entire team and the expert participants, t-shirt raffle for you all soon :) Sign up for news at braingpt.org 6/6
"Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results" w @ken-lxl.bsky.social and braingpt.org. LLMs integrate a noisy yet interrelated scientific literature to forecast outcomes. arxiv.org/abs/2403.03230 1/6
"Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results" w @ken-lxl.bsky.social and braingpt.org. LLMs integrate a noisy yet interrelated scientific literature to forecast outcomes. arxiv.org/abs/2403.03230 1/6
Bradley Love reposted
Why do universities ignore good ideas? mindmatters.ai/2024/03/why-...
Bradley Love reposted
#CitAI_seminars: On Thu, March 21 at 16:00 GTM, Bradley C. Love @profdata.bsky.social will deliver a talk on "Taming the neuroscience literature with explanatory and predictive models" More information: cit-ai.net/seminars.html If you wish to Zoom in, email the organisers or @emp1.bsky.social
Bradley Love reposted
Are you interested in getting your science journalism career started? The Transmitter is seeking a summer intern to cover the fast-moving field of neuroscience. Find out more and apply for the role here: simonsfoundation.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/simons...