Cian O'Donnell
Researcher with public evidence across AI research, Culture, work & education.
- AI signals
- 3 past 30d
- Sources
- 3 distinct domains
- Discussions
- 8 past 30d
- Latest signal
- 4h ago
Articles & links
This is a great piece by Bill Bialek. arxiv.org/abs/2611.14381 He is an excellent and engaging writer. I wish though for a field where more people without his level of standing or privilege could feel free to write science in their own voice with more freedom of style beyond t…
- William Bialek argues optimization can be promoted to a principle from which neural function and mechanism are derived, ideally with no free parameters.
- The paper's headline claim: optimal performance need not require the underlying mechanisms to have finely tuned parameters, contrary to widely held intuitions.
- The piece revisits diffraction-limited optics in insect eyes and recent theory on optimal motion estimation in fly vision as its anchoring cases.
Recent commentary
Massive congrats to my PhD student @jajmca.bsky.social, co-supervised by John Wade & @conjh.bsky.social, who handed in his PhD thesis yesterday inside 3 years, virtually unheard of in the UK! Amazing theoretical/computational work linking structure to function in recurrent neural networks.
Surely the purpose of Trump's AI Force is to enable a surveillance state. More generally I am not so much worried about AGI or AI taking over humans, but humans using AI as a weapon for cyber attacks or a tool for mass surveillance on other humans.
circa 2010 during my PhD in a comp neuro/machine learning institute, at a computer vision seminar I asked a naive question and speaker said, yeah there is a running joke in ML that what we really need is 'a big model that knows everything'. Cue a chuckle from the audience How blind we were
I know people mourn the loss of the ability to use the em-dash for fear of suspicion of AI-ing their writing. But for me the big one is the rule of three - losing that has made me sad, frustrated, and even downright perturbed.
I teach a MSc module on Statistical Modelling and Machine Learning 4 years running, and every year without fail, I have to look up, many times, the difference between Type I and Type II errors Why were they not just named after some extinct eugenicists like everything else in statistics
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