Blake Richards

Researcher at Google and CIFAR Fellow, working on the intersection of machine learning and neuroscience in Montréal (academic affiliations: @mcgill.ca and @mila-quebec.bsky.social).

Articles & links

New perspective piece with @mandanas.bsky.social: We argue, based on LLMs and old connectionist theories, that schemas shouldn't be viewed as distinct from semantic or episodic memories. They're just one end of a detailed-to-abstract memory spectrum: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt.…

cell.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 66 ↻ 18 ↩ 1 · 2 from the directory shared this · 35d ago
Blake Richards reposted
@neurovium.bsky.social

new paper, #NeuroAI 📣📜 Can measured cortical organization be used as an inductive bias for artificial recurrent neural networks? In this work, we ask whether cortical geometry, wiring, and function can push RNNs learn. Not as metaphor, but as measurable structure! 1/n🧵👇 arxiv.…

Harnessing cortical geometry, wiring, and function as inductive biases for recurrent neural networks arxiv.org
AI Weekly's analysis
  • Researchers built RNNs from spatial and connectivity data covering nearly 12,000 neurons from mouse visual cortex.
  • Biologically constrained networks consistently outperformed baseline models across three cognitive decision-making tasks.
  • Functional weight initialization, not spatial structure alone, provided the largest single performance boost.
Read full analysis →
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Recent commentary

Sanders' proposal for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies is, IMO, a good idea. AI will be a critical piece of infrastructure, one which should be built with appropriate safe-guards and environmental planning. Trying to cancel AI is foolish - but leaving it to market forces is too.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 24 ↻ 4 ↩ 3 · 36d ago

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