Author: xcorr

• How science startups actually work

  

  It’s tough being an academic these days. Between the tiny number of permanent positions and the systemic exploitation of cheap labour, people are looking for a way out. Students, postdocs, and even PIs are asking themselves: should I join a startup? Should I make my own startup? It sounds seductive—change the world! Make money! Keep […]

• Large language models will change science

  

  It takes dedication to keep up with the scientific literature. 2344 papers were accepted at last year’s NeurIPS conference. Who has time to read all of that? It’s difficult to see the forest from the trees as ever more research is published. What if every single one of us had infinite access to world experts […]

• What’s the endgame of neuroAI?

  

  This blog post was adapted into an article for a16z’s Future. It’s been 60 years since Hubel and Wiesel first started unlocking the mysteries of the visual system. Proceeding one neuron at a time, they discovered the fundamental building blocks of vision, the simple and complex cells. Yet for a long time, neurons in high-level […]

• Unsupervised models of the brain

  

  We’re in a golden age of merging AI and neuroscience. No longer tied to conventional publication venues with year-long turnaround times, our field is moving at record speed. 2021 saw a Cambrian explosion of research into unsupervised learning to explain brain representations, which is teaching us about how the brain might have evolved for sensing. […]

• The Good Research Code Handbook

  

  When I was in grad school, I wrote a lot of code which ended up biting me later. It wasn’t until I got a job as a software engineer at Google that I discovered better ways of organizing code. Writing reusable, easy-to-read code is a core skill to have when you’re spending half of your […]

• Dimensionality reduction in neural data analysis

  

  It’s become commonplace to record from hundreds of neurons simultaneously. If past trends extrapolate, we might commonly record 10k neurons by 2030. What are we going to do with all this data? To deal with a 14-dimensional space, visualize a 3D space and say fourteen to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it. Geoffrey Hinton Neural […]