iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Alex Williams @itsneuronal.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

For better and for worse... our field is way too poorly specified 🙃

Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 19h

Haha this is key. Actually what I love about biology. I guess q then is, are humans fundamentally better at handling this fuzzy thinking than current AI? Or is it just that a lot of our actual, real but fuzzy knowledge exists only in our collective minds and is not published, so AI can't access it

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John C. Baez @johncarlosbaez.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Math isn't being devastated. A bunch of medium hard to quite hard problems that humans have made up and worked on extensively are getting finished off by AI. AI is also a great way for mathematicians to learn more math. The future is unpredictable, but I wouldn't declare devastation just yet.

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 19h

I like this vision and hope it materialises.

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 19h

Very good point and agree they are poor at this right now. But we humans (well me anyway) often come up with ideas that fail when we test via simulation. What's to stop AI doing the same?

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 19h

🤣 can't see OpenAI leading a press release with that one

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

That could be the key to longevity in this brave new world! Although don't you still need good lab hands? Also now settling into my 40s I don't know if my back can cope with the requisite standing, bending, leaning demands

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

good points Dan. I guess my fear is that much of what we do in neuro theory isn't actually 'new'... it is joining the dots between fields, adapting concepts and methods from one area to another, etc. This seems to be exactly how AI is beating human mathematicians. It is more jacker of more tradsers

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Haha, a tempting offer. Is that a safer enclave?

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It would be the development, vetting, and dissemination of new theories and models of brain function. Thats all we currently do. No proofs required 😀 If we are lucky or persuasive these proposals may go to be tested in lab experiments - as now, that is the only actual verification

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The field of mathematics is being devastated in front of our eyes. For neuroscience, experimentalists may be safe, but how long until the AI-research wave takes over our computational/theoretical neuroscience? Is there any reason they can't? They can code, they can do maths. They know neurobiology

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crumb @crumb.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4998...

ihoggan
I was a graph theory junkie long ago and even moved to Budapest for awhile to study among the greats. While I was there I started working on Barnette's Conjecture which came to occupy my thoughts over the next 24 years of my life, on and off as I worked in many different fields. Last summer I even thought for a few days that I had actually solved it. But it's supposedly proven here - problem 180. I don't know what to think exactly. I spent thousands of hours on that problem. I really enjoyed it. Hearing that it is solved somehow makes me sad in a far-off way, like hearing an ex-girlfriend died suddenly in a car crash. I don't know, there's probably a lot of people feeling odd emotions tonight. There's no Lean proof for this one so I'm digesting the paper. On the surface it looks like an approach I considered 24 years ago and abandoned.
I revisited the problem this summer, along with my partial solutions, when the previous round of stunning proofs came out. Several hours of work with Fable simply convinced me it wasn't yet solvable and reinforced how hard of a problem it was.

jboggan
I went back to that Fable chat and showed it this new preprint. It coded up the new constructive algorithm and ran it against the existing test suite, that looks good at least.
It has been super helpful in delineating where the crucial concept came from. The proof is rather simple as graph theory proofs go, but it does seem to use some constructions that would only seem obvious if you had serious physics experience with partition function and calculating energy states that cancel out. It's not a wholly alien bolt from the heavens, but I can also see how there hasn't been a human being with the broad theoretical physics knowledge combined with the deep graph theory experience in planar graphs to come up with this idea. I don't know, I'm looking for precedents of this formulation and some old papers of Penrose counting the number of edge colorings of this same graph type are coming up, the line of argument at least rhymes. But I agree with the thought that this sort of progress should not be siloed inside those companies. I propose a tax so that every slop cannon Al video pays for another hour of compute time for advancing mathematics.
reply

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David Schoppik @schoppik.com · 07/10/2026

If you've ever wondered how the brain *really* keeps things in mind, come let Aaron, Nick & their colleagues in the Nagel lab tell you how the fly does it here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

A split attractor design for rapidly writing a navigational goal - Nature

The recurrent h∆K–PFG neural circuit generates persistent heading memories through slow excitation, fast inhibition and a disinhibitory gate, where disinhibition controls the functional...

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Yes! I was just complaining about this the other day. Never been sent so many walls of text to process and respond to

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Molly White @molly.wiki · 06/10/2026

“You are infringing on the time and brainpower of people by pushing "your" content that little/no of your brainpower went into” is such a banger

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Karl Deisseroth @deisseroth.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Thank you to everyone sharing in this moment! I’m so grateful to all my trainees & collaborators… dlab.stanford.edu/group-members (pic: Peter and I together in 2017) Reading for all those asking: for technical details: dlab.stanford.edu for everyone: deisseroth.org/projections

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I started neuroscience in 2006, must have been 07/08 when I first heard of optogenetics via a journal club during my PhD. The presenter (my supervisor) said this might win a Nobel prize. I was surprised and thought: we can already stimulate neurons with electrodes, this light thing is just a gimmick

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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

"AI for mathematics...beyond all reasonable doubt the field is undergoing a rapid transformation, unlike anything that we have ever seen...Language models are solving hard problems which humans could not, and mathematicians are reacting very differently" xenaproject.wordpress.com/2026/10/01/t...

xenaproject.wordpress.com

To grieve, or not to grieve?

Recent events in the field of AI for mathematics have shown us beyond all reasonable doubt that the field is currently undergoing a rapid transformation, unlike anything that we have ever seen befo…

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I'd see a sliding scale between flexibility and freedom to examine things vs rigour and empirical grounding: fiction - philosophy - mathematical modelling - experiments

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

and on reflection I don't think I was ever motivated to study the brain in order to build intelligent systems (although more interested recently). I just wanted to know how brains work

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Ah sorry then I misunderstood your claim! Thought you meant brain algorithms

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

imo theres plenty of aspects of brain function that are different enough to AI systems that mean we won't understand them 'for free' by just studying large DNNs: - neural drift - biological learning rules - spike coding - energy efficiency - noisy computation - development - brain disorders etc

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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 02/10/2026

This will never stop blowing my mind. A 12-year sequence of real telescope images of a star 133 lightyears away. And around it, four planets slowly orbiting. Four real exoplanets, each more massive than Jupiter, imaged as they move around their host star.

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

agree commuting sucks and liveable cities would be great. But I disagree that working full time in office would suit everyone - people have highly varied life& home circumstances and personalities, what works for one might not work for another. Flexibility and choice are key

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Renato Duarte @rcfduarte.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The EuroNMC COST Action has started — a four-year European network on neuromorphic computing. I am leading WG1: Foundations & Theoretical Models. Our question: when does a biological mechanism actually buy you something computationally, and when should it be deliberately violated? Join us!

cost.eu

European Network for NeuroMorphic Computing

AI has advanced rapidly and enabled a broad spectrum of applications. The most capable models driving these applications rely on billions of parameters and large-scale computing resources, leading to ...

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

the @simonsfoundation.org SFARI are doing hero work aggregating Autism data across their consortium sites. Latest SPARK release has phenotype data from a mind-boggling >448,000 individuals (>191,000 ASD): www.sfari.org/resource/spa... Genomic data available for >100k of these too

sfari.org

SFARI | Phenotypic Data

Explore phenotypic data available to autism researchers and powered by SPARK, a cohort of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative.

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Yeah I've given up on assuming there's a 'right' way to say names any more. Ultimately up to the person imo von Neumann was originally Hungarian I believe, but spent most of his working life in the US

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Cool thanks Anna-Lena! Hard to argue with!

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Anna-Lena Eckert @eckertal.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

/vɒn ˈnɔɪmən/ --> NOY-man, the interviewer says his name at 1:40 and he does not correct him ;) youtu.be/vLbllFHBQM4?...

youtu.be

John Von Neumann Interview

YouTube video by sierranevadatrail

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Aitor Morales-Gregorio @aitormg.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Don't miss our latest poster at #Bernstein2026 on Tuesday afternoon II-25 "Wiring without firing: geometric rules generate brain architecture and dynamics" Conference abstract 💬: doi.org/10.12751/nnc... Preprint 📝: doi.org/10.48550/arX...

doi.org

Bernstein Conference 2026

Conference Abstracts

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Ok can we please settle once and for all: how to pronounce John von Neumann? von NU-man von NOY-man von NYOO-man

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I remember trying to describe my PhD project on neuronal electrical noise from stochastic ion channel gating to my non-scientist flatmate, I was gesticulating and yammering on for around 5 mins. He nodded along politely then afterwards asked, ok but what does this have to do with hearing?

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Think we have found the solution. bsky.app/profile/jose...

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The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

In his essay, @apeyrache.bsky.social argues that implementing a lottery system in grant review saves researchers time, reduces strategic resubmission and accepts that, above a quality threshold, luck has always played a part in science funding. www.thetransmitter.org/funding/gran...

thetransmitter.org

How about adding an element of chance to grant review?

A process that uses a lottery system saves time and accepts that, above a quality threshold, luck has always played a part in science funding.

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

While that may have been the original intent it is far from the current sentiment. I'm even a bit turned off by the tricolour these days due to its hijacking by "Ireland is for the Irish" types... similar story with St George flag in England

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John Stott @jpsastro.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Had a UKRI funded grant proposal rejected at the "AI triage stage". "This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review." 🧪 #academicsky

I am writing to let you know that, unfortunately, your application was not successful.

Review process

As part of the initial triage of the 179 proposals submitted to this call, each was assessed using an AI-based review. Every proposal was read independently by several different AI models against the same seven criteria used to shape this call (including cyber security relevance, research quality and novelty, importance of the problem addressed, feasibility of the project plan, likely outputs and impact, value for money, and responsible research practice), with each model asked to give a score and a written justification with supporting quotations from the text. To guard against any one model's idiosyncrasies, we also ran a second, independent process in which different AI models debated the merits and weaknesses of each proposal before reaching a judgement, again against the same criteria. Scores from both processes were combined to produce an overall ranking.

This AI-based triage was used only to identify approximately 50% of the strongest proposals to take forward to full human review. Projects selected for funding were drawn from those that progressed to the full human review stage. We recognise that AI-assisted assessment is a new and evolving part of the review process, and we are continuing to evaluate how well it aligns with the judgements of human reviewers on this call. We will soon produce a document detailing our method, so that others can build upon it and improve it.

Feedback on your application

Your application was not selected to progress beyond the AI triage stage. To provide transparency on the outcome of this assessment, we are sharing below the scores (out of 5) from each of the two AI review processes described above, together with the mean score across the two processes.

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Steven Cook @dumpyunc.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

A few words about what I’ve been up to at Flourish. Reach out if this resonates with you and you’d like to talk! fewerbetterfaster.substack.com/p/the-parts-...

fewerbetterfaster.substack.com

The Parts List AI Doesn’t Have

Mapping the human brain with light

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

kind of fever dream crossover between Hamnet and Blade Runner

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

mark mark mark. Don't overthink these things

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Catherine Dulac @dulaclab.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I am highly humbled to be this year recipient of the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize for outstanding women in biomedical research: its first awardee was my PhD advisor Nicole Le Douarin, an extraordinary scientist and mentor! Importantly, this award also recognizes the amazing scientists from my lab.

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Fingers crossed we'll soon be getting pairwise posterior distribution plots

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Cian O'Donnell @cianodonnell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

British politics may be basket case but I for one am delighted about the growing and well overdue use of error bars on these voting projection charts

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Adam Bienkov @adambienkov.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The British right has now descended to the point where 'the England team are not English' is becoming the consensus position

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Nico Schuck @nicoschuck.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

2023: 8,039 proposals 2024: 10,360 proposals 2025: 17,066 proposals 2026: 21,627 proposals Something's gotta give

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Ben de Bivort @debivort.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Hello friends, the Harvard Life Science departments have banded together to hire a new colleague working at the intersection of Life Sciences and AI. Could be primarily an experimentalist, or could be primarily a compute/theorist. academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/16773

academicpositions.harvard.edu

Tenure-Track Professor in Life Science and AI

The Life Sciences Departments in Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences seek to recruit a tenure-track professor whose research is at the interface of AI and life sciences, from methodological developme...

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