Foundation models for neuroscience - by Patrick Mineault

Opportunities and pitfalls of large-scale models

I’m giving a talk for the NIH Neuroethics Working Group (NEWG) on foundation models for neuroscience on Aug 21st1. The audience is neuroscientists, philosophers and ethicists involved in the burgeoning field of neuroethics. “Foundation models for neuroscience” is a broad enough topic that it can be hard to talk about all its implications–both opportunities and ethical pitfalls–in a precise way. I’ll focus on a technical overview of the field, at a sufficiently high level of abstraction that folks outside of technical AI work will be able to follow, yet concrete enough that we can talk about…

related reading

• On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Modelsarxiv.org
• How we collected 10,000 hours of neuro-language data in our basement - Conduitcondu.it
• Neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic. Consciousness is whytheintrinsicperspective.com
• Foundation Models for Oversight | Transluce AItransluce.org
• Language models can explain neurons in language modelsopenaipublic.blob.core.windows.net
• Five Predictions for AI in 2023rakgarg.substack.com
• Language Model Circuits Are Sparse in the Neuron Basis | Transluce AItransluce.org
• Dimensionality reduction in neural data analysisxcorr.net
• Foundation model - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
• Scaling is subtler than it seemsberen.io
• GitHub - mazabou/awesome-neurofm: A curated list of awesome neuro-foundation modelsgithub.com
• Neurotechnology is Critical for AI Alignmentmilan.cvitkovic.net