Dendritic computation for cognitive flexibility Our new paper in Science identifies rule-belief signals in the distal apical dendrites of cortical pyramidal neurons. These signals integrate with somatic sensory signals to support flexible decisions. science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…

Many people are talking about Marco Rubio's speech at the Munich Security Conference a week ago. It may have been the most explicit defense of the colonial tradition by a senior Western official since Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler’s imperial diatribes nearly a century ago — supremacist views that claimed millions of lives from the fields of Bengal to the streets of Leningrad. But few are comparing it to the speech that came right afterwards — from Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. The two speeches offered perhaps the clearest expression of the shape of the bifurcating world order that we have heard from world leaders in this century. Where Rubio drew a racial line between the governors and the subjects of the world system, Wang Yi outlined principles for global governance rooted in “sovereign equality, international rule of law, multilateralism, a people-centered approach, and real actions”. Where Rubio attacked global institutions, Wang Yi defended the universality of the UN in terms that spoke directly to the imperatives of the Global South: “On the UN platform, each country, regardless of its size or wealth, has a voice and a sacred vote as well as its due obligations and equal rights.” Without the United Nations, he warned, “the world would revert to the law of the jungle where the strong prey on the weak.” Where Rubio called on the West to be unapologetic and unashamed in imposing its way of life on others, Wang Yi called on major countries to lead by example — recognizing global diversity, “pursuing cooperation instead of conflict or confrontation” and "promoting equality instead of imposing their will onto others.” Where Rubio insisted on throwing off the fetters of international law, Wang Yi emphasized the importance of “observing rules instead of applying double standards.” There is hope amid all the gloom. First, because Rubio's speech was obviously that of a hegemony in decline. The past to which he refers is over and cannot be brought back. And second, because there are still adults in the room — whose words, like Rubio's, are not hollow, but reflect the ongoing construction of a fairer new world order.

Demis Hassabis’s “Einstein test” for defining AGI: Train a model on all human knowledge but cut it off at 1911, then see if it can independently discover general relativity (as Einstein did by 1915); if yes, it’s AGI.

In insane speech, Marco Rubio asks Europe to help US recolonize Global S... piped.video/4mWRy7A1cJI?si=w2fg… via @YouTube

My postdoc work "Unsupervised pretraining in biological neural networks" is out now, along with more than 400GB (milliions neurons) neural data. nature.com/articles/s41586-0…. Figshare and Github links can be found in the paper.

CNeuro2025 is landing in Shanghai (ION)! A new edition of the Theoretical and Computation Neuroscience Summer School since 2018!

Faculty job in Computational Neuroscience at the Institute of Neuroscience, CAS, in Shanghai!

Please visit the website for more information: changbrainforum.cn

The 1st Chang Hsiang-Tung Brain Science Symposium will be held in Shanghai, Oct 26-28, 2024. Over 20 leading experts will be speaking! Registration is open for international participants. Poster submissions are welcome! Space is limited. Please register and submit soon!

Free webinar from Dr. Yulong Li: Spying on Neuromodulation with Novel Genetically Encoded Fluorescent Sensors. Feel free to attend and communicate with us. CET 2:00 PM, March 28th (Thursday) bityl.co/Oz7l

Clone Robotics is a humanoid robot startup that flies under everyone's radar; they have a uniquely innovative approach to the robot's body. The Poland-based company, founded in Nov 2021, is designing a human-like musculoskeletal body using hydraulic tendon muscles.

Optimus folds a shirt

Too often, we think a task is easy because some animal can do it. But the reality is that the task is fiendishly complex and the animal is much smarter than we think. Conversely, we think tasks like playing chess, calculating an integral, or producing grammatically correct text are complex because only some humans can do them after years of training. But it turns out these things aren't that complicated and computers can do them much better than us. This is why the phrase "Artificial General Intelligence" to designate human-level intelligence makes absolutely no sense.

Excited to introduce our optimized green and red fluorescent dopamine (DA) GRAB sensors #GRABSensors #dopamine Great collaboration with Mitsuko Uchida‘s group at Harvard University, Yingjie Zhu’s group at SIAT, John Williams’ group and Marina Wolf’s group at OHSU.

This is an ape ("Kanzi") playing Minecraft! A fascinating experiment on non-human biological neural networks 🙉 I've been teaching AI to play Minecraft for too long. There're so many similar techniques that the ape trainers used: - In-context reinforcement learning: Kanzi gets a fruit or peanut whenever he hits a marked milestone in the game, incentivizing him to follow the in-game guides. - RLHF: Kanzi doesn't understand much language, but he can see the trainers cheering him on, and he occasionally cheers them back! That gives him a strong signal that he's on the right track. - Imitation learning: the trainers show Kanzi just 1 demonstration of how to do a task, and he immediately grasps the concepts. It's much more efficient than using rewards alone. - Curriculum learning: they start with very simple environments to gradually teach Kanzi the controls. At the end, Kanzi is able to navigate complex caves, mazes, and the Nether. It also amazes me how strong the ape's vision system is. Kanzi never saw Minecraft in his life, and for sure his ancestors didn't either. Yet he rapidly adapts to Minecraft's texture and physics, which are dramatically different from the natural world. This level of generalization is far beyond what our most powerful vision models can do today. We are right in the thick of Moravec's paradox again: our best AIs are approaching human level on understanding language, but far behind animals on parsing pixels. From YouTube channel "ChrisDaCow": piped.video/watch?v=UKpFoYqN… Researchers are from the Ape Initiative, a non-profit org.