Timothy O'Leary
Professor of Engineering and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge
- UKRI will more than double its AI research budget to £397m. The R&D+compute budget of OpenAI = $8.5b. A single company has nearly 20 times the research budget of an entire G7 country. The lesson is simple: we can't chase the same research goals. We need to take risks that VC-backed companies won't.
- Reposted by Timothy O'LearyModerna have announced that they won't run new phase three trials now with massive impacts for new vaccine development- why- its because of RFK Jr and his anti-vaccine campaigns and cancelling mRNA vaccine research which affect the sales the company can then make 🧪🧵 #PublicHealth
- AI alignment:
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- I worry that wikipedia is losing ground to LLMs, like google gemini. Should I worry? Is this happening? Is this a bad thing?
- Reposted by Timothy O'Learywhen doing neuroscience projects I often advocate for computational modelling, followed by data analysis to test model's predictions. however a few times now I have had pushback from collaborators/reivewers suggesting it would be better to do the data analysis first, then the modelling. thoughts?
- Or is this just evidence that the Royal Society lost relevance a long time ago? Having this tool on their books at least gives them the occasional headline.
- If the @royalsociety.org won’t stand up for scientific values like truth, evidence & the importance of not spreading misinformation on an industrial scale, then who will? www.theguardian.com/science/2026...
- Reposted by Timothy O'LearyWould love to hear expert views on this paper. It appears to show that the operationalization of brain activity the field has relied on for 3 decades—the BOLD response—is not actually a sensible measure of brain activity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Reposted by Timothy O'LearyWhat is the computational role of dendritic excitations? Byung Hun Lee and team mapped voltage dynamics throughout the dendritic trees of CA1 pyramidal neurons in mice navigating in virtual reality. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
- See also M Dresler's clever analysis of "predatory funding" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/EJRMFD...
- This report in Nature on the costs of competing for & administering scientific grants is shocking: "In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained." www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪
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- I had a PhD application with an entirely hallucinated reference section. When I asked the kid why I couldn't find the journals let alone the references, he doubled down and said they were placeholders for the actual papers and the rest was definitely his work. We can't keep on top of this.
- Reposted by Timothy O'LearyWhen your PI presents your work
- Researchers extract latent representation of humanity's future from latest AI model
- "a control system"
- Meanwhile, applicants explore use of AI in writing proposals and... fuck it, everything.
- UKRI exploring use of AI in grant review - this will prompt debate but interested to know if people think it’d encourage novelty or the opposite? www.chemistryworld.com/news/ukri-op...
- With the US demonstrating its role as the paragon of democracy, unsullied by bribery and manipulation by wealthy individuals, the UK is desperate to follow. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... Reform UK receives record £9mn donation from Christopher Harborne
- Reposted by Timothy O'LearyArtificial intelligence promises rapid and polite feedback on papers — but we must first review the reviewer. This stand first says it all… A timely World View Colin in our pages by Giorgio Gilestro 🧪 #academicSky @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...
- This kind of approach is crucial for a theory of intelligence:
- We are opening a FACULTY POSITION (tenure track, permanent) in the University of Cambridge at the interface of control and biology, interpreted broadly. Theorists and wet lab quantitative biologists with backgrounds in control, EE, applied math, ... apply by Jan 28! www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/univers...
- OK UKRI
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- Hmm.... ya think?
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- Farming failed to take off in Europe due to a shortage of heads it seems.
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- Reposted by Timothy O'Learyhey I'm reposting this for no reason at all today... www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
- Decades after it was raised as an issue in neurophysiology it is nice to see this topic confronted in the ML/neural net community. I just wish the intellectual connections were stronger and more explicit, because we can't sensibly separate ideas from neuro with those in AI.
- 📍Excited to share that our paper was selected as a Spotlight at #NeurIPS2025! arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03972 It started from a question I kept running into: When do RNNs trained on the same task converge/diverge in their solutions? 🧵⬇️
- my little take on whole-brain neurophysiology and what it tells us about global coordination of neural activity on behavioural timescales (I steered clear of tasteless analogies for this one...) authors.elsevier.com/a/1m7H5_LsQS...
