The Theory of Contravariance, Part 0 - by Dan Yamins

Breaking down our extensive new theory paper.

The Theory of Contravariance, Part 0 Breaking down our extensive new theory paper. Dan Yamins Jul 13, 2026 9 Share Aran Nayebi and I have just released a rather, uhm … let’s say, sizeable… new paper on the Theory of Contravariance . Because it’s a long paper and has many different ideas in it, we’re going to be writing a multi-part substack series on it, beginning with this post describing the overall purpose of the project. What needs to be explained in NeuroAI? Why is there apparent convergent evolution between task-driven neural network models and the brain? Over the past 15 years in NeuroA

related reading

• Alignment remains a hard, unsolved problem — LessWronglesswrong.com
• Naturally Occurring Equivariance in Neural Networksdistill.pub
• The Platonic Representation Hypothesisphillipi.github.io
• Neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic. Consciousness is whytheintrinsicperspective.com
• Neural population geometry and optimal coding of tasks with shared latent structurenature.com
• Spatially embedded recurrent neural networks reveal widespread links between structural and functional neuroscience findingsnature.com
• Notes towards Neurostimulation and Mathematical Neurosciencebernoullicollective.org
• The Platonic Representation Hypothesisarxiv.org
• Mechanistic Interpretability: A Challenge Common to Both Artificial and Biological Intelligencekempnerinstitute.harvard.edu
• Continuous Thought Machinespub.sakana.ai
• Computational and systems neuroscience: The next 20 yearspmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Trading places: What happens when neuroscience turns into machine learning, and machine learning turns into neuroscience?thetransmitter.org