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Blake Richards

@tyrellturing.bsky.social
12K followers 3.3K following 3.4K posts

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).

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Reposted by Blake Richards
lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Honestly I think it's a bit of a fools' errand to try and get people to stop anthropomorphising LLMs. I say my computer is angry at me if it beeps too loud.
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Blaise Agüera y Arcas @blaiseaguera.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
This week marks one year since “What Is Intelligence?” was published.
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Mila - Institut québécois d'IA @mila-quebec.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Bravo à Blake Richards, McGill/Mila qui remporte le prestigieux prix Schmidt Sciences Polymath 2026 ! Une reconnaissance de son parcours remarquable et de ses ambitions pour l'avenir de l'IA et des neurosciences ! www.schmidtsciences.org/2026-polymat...
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Mila - Institut québécois d'IA @mila-quebec.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Congratulations to Blake Richards, McGill/Mila, on winning the prestigious 2026 Schmidt Sciences Polymath Award! A well-deserved recognition of his remarkable journey and his bold vision for the future of AI and neuroscience! lnkd.in/gRDPtGVY
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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I’m beyond honoured to be named a 2026 @schmidtsciences.bsky.social Polymath. With US$2.5 million over five years, I’ll be able to pursue an interdisciplinary project to combine quantitative and qualitative data to better capture human neurodiversity. 🧠📈 www.schmidtsciences.org/2026-polymat...
schmidtsciences.org
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McGill Research + Innovation @mcgill-research.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Congratulations to Prof. Blake Richards on winning the 2026 Schmidt Sciences Polymaths Award🎉 With the $2.5M prize, his team will build AI models that capture the uniqueness of individual minds, potentially advancing mental health care👏 🔗Read more: reporter.mcgill.ca/blake-richar...
A red slide with Prof. Richards' photo, title, departments, and the title of the award.
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Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I love this program. Some of my favorite people! Stephanie Palmer (U Chicago), @oritpeleg.bsky.social, and now @tyrellturing.bsky.social … no doubt many more. If you have received tenure w/in the last 3 years (++), get nominated. www.schmidtsciences.org/schmidt-scie...
schmidtsciences.org
Schmidt Science Polymaths - Schmidt Sciences
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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
My hot take: We were *already* in a state of being overwhelmed by reviewing grants, scholarships, and papers prior to generative AI. Now it's not even close to tenable. The time to start rethinking the entire peer review model in #academia was 10 years ago. Hopefully this will force it!
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tbabb @tbabb.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
approximately one industry in our civilization has figured out "systematically keep track of things that go wrong, and then systematically try to prevent them from happening again", and this is the result
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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Best essay of all time? Why am I asking, the answer is yes...
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Andrew D Wilson @adw.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only decorative gourd article, that whosoever retweeteth him should not perish, but have everlasting decorative gourds, motherfucker
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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Two tenure track positions are open in Computer Science @mcgill.ca ! Secure Software mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/McGill... Quantum Computing mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/McGill... Come join our department, and live in the coolest city in North America! (Yeah, I stand by that.)
mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com
Tenure-Track Faculty Position in Computer Science: Secure Software and Computer Systems
Please refer to the How to Apply for a Job (for External Candidates) job aid for instructions on how to apply. If you are an active McGill employee (ie: currently in an active contract or position at ...
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Andrej Bicanski @andrejbicanski.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Now accepted and published --- with many thanks to the referees for helping sharpen the manuscript. Long time since the first notes. Good to see it officially out. www.cell.com/current-biol...
cell.com
A vector navigation and inference architecture can construct universal cognitive maps for abstract reasoning
Bicanski proposes an algorithm and neural mechanisms for the iterative construction of abstract cognitive maps via non-local inference. Map positions are triangulated and memorized by a set of extant ...
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WeberLab@McGill @weber-lab.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
🚨We're hiring!!🚨 @biomcgill.bsky.social is looking for a Quantitative Cell Biologist to join our diverse and interdisciplinary community. Please share this ad broadly, and reach out if you have any questions. mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/McGill...
mcgill.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com
Assistant Professor in Quantitative Cell Biology - Department of Biology
Please refer to the How to Apply for a Job (for External Candidates) job aid for instructions on how to apply. If you are an active McGill employee (ie: currently in an active contract or position at ...
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Michael Hendricks 🇨🇦 @michaelhendricks.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
FAQ City: Montreal...really the best, no question Mascot: Non-existent, legless bird symbolizing endless toil What's for lunch: Onigiri place just opened on the ground floor...really turning a corner here People: Lots of super nice biologists, spanning outside kind to inside kind Vibes: see "City"
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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
New benchmark for neuro-foundation models work! Based on the International Brain Laboratory (IBL) this benchmark is ideal for exploring generalization across a variety of domains. If you're doing ML for neural data, you should check it out! #neuroscience #NeuroAI 🧪
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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
This is so neat - a thermodynamic computer (well, a very simple prototype) made from DNA. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
A thermodynamically favoured molecular computer - Nature
Scaffolded DNA Computer performs diverse computations while thermodynamically relaxing towards equilibrium, demonstrating simplicity, reusability, speed, robustness and scalability of the approac...
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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I've spent a lot of years studying a lot of collapses, and the truth of the matter is that they're always mundane: mild climatic shifts that reduce crop yields, a dumbass in power who makes some terrible decisions, neglecting things that obviously matter but the will to fix them can't be summoned.
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Luke Sjulson @lukesjulson.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I have no idea where this is from, but @philoneurosci.bsky.social posted it on our lab slack, and it was so good I had to share it
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 18/09/2026
I drafted a post earlier today saying this: That the rationalist longtemists are simply bad at math — bad at science, and doing scientism — and it comes from an overbelief in their own reasoning. Which is a lack of epistemic humility.
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Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
His dad definitely paid someone to take his SATs.
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Jibran Khokhar @drjkhokhar.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
So grateful to @thetransmitter.bsky.social for the opportunity to talk about a paper that truly shaped how I think about my science by @fowleruci.bsky.social and @paulkennyphd.bsky.social! They helped make causal sense of the association that people call “Mr. Big“ in the context of 🚬!
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Simon Schultz @simonschultz.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
New paper out in PLOS Comp Biology - collaboration with Simon Stringer and Dan Goodman Hierarchical feature binding in a spiking neural network model of the primate ventral visual pathway Brian Gardner et al journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
journals.plos.org
Hierarchical feature binding in a spiking neural network model of the primate ventral visual pathway
Author summary How the brain pieces together visual details into coherent objects, known as the feature binding problem, remains an unresolved conceptual challenge in neuroscience. Existing theories e...
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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
1/ Conscious AI and Biological Naturalism. A long time in the making, but the full collection is *out now* in Behavioural and Brain Sciences I deeply thank all my many commentators for their wise, broad, and deep opinions on this critical topic.I also thank them for their saintly patience. 🙏🏽
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Mark Wagner @mark-j-wagner.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Granule cells predict future dopamine reward. Delayed climbing-fiber signals can reinforce the action that precedes it. Our paper, led by Benjamin Filio, is out today in Nature Neuroscience. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Public PDF: rdcu.be/RscCNeXvkXAa
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Randy McIntosh @ar0mcintosh.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/s...
theguardian.com
European Union invites Canada to become first ever ‘associate member’
Commission president says EU must ‘urgently reimagine our partnerships’ as she makes unprecedented offer
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Glen Berseth @glenberseth.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
In the 1960s, Minsky's lab had a robot arm using computer vision to see object geometry, plan a path, and assemble a set of parts. Foundational models today are still largely solving this same class of problem, just far cheaper and faster to set up.
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Guillaume Lajoie @glajoie.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
In brain-computer interfacing, clever and adaptive decoders help brains learn complex tasks faster. These can impact the nature of solutions learned by the brain. Our new paper is one of the first attempts to study this effect. W/ @neuroamyo.bsky.social and team www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Assistive algorithms influence neural representations in motor brain-computer interfaces - Nature Communications
Assistive algorithms are widely used in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), but their effects on neural representations remain unclear. Here, the authors show that adaptive BCIs lead the brain to learn ...
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Patrick Mineault @patrickmineault.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Are virtual flies playing Beat Saber? SM64? Doom? No. The new fly connectome is an incredible achievement! Less is going on in the sim videos than it seems. I'm stoked to see people engage with neuroscience though. My breakdown: www.neuroai.science/p/are-flies-...
neuroai.science
Are flies playing Beat Saber?
What a time to be alive!
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Blaise Agüera y Arcas @blaiseaguera.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
A beautiful demonstration of symbiogenesis in action in the world of artificial life from one of our student researchers in Pi, @kjha02.bsky.social. Evolving agents on a shared memory tape, he and his co-authors show that when compute is a budgeted resource, cooperation emerges organically.
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Sakana AI @sakanaai.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Introducing PC-ALM: a local-learning alternative to backprop that trains 1000-layer neural nets using only local dynamics. Blog: pub.sakana.ai/pc-alm/
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Bloomberg News @bloomberg.com · 14/09/2026
Canada wants to see the creation of a global “technology stability” body to help oversee AI and ensure it is safe, Prime Minister Mark Carney said
bloom.bg
Carney Calls for Global Tech Body to Strengthen AI Guardrails
Canada wants to see the creation of a global “technology stability” body to help oversee artificial intelligence and ensure it is safe, Prime Minister Mark Carney said.
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Michael Baym @baym.lol · 13/09/2026
Ten years ago Tami, Roy, and I released a movie we made of antibiotic resistance evolving in real time. I thought maybe a couple thousand people tops would see it. I couldn't have imagined it would be seen millions of times, and be taught from middle school through the graduate level worldwide
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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
This thread is good to read. In my experience, what @michaelhendricks.bsky.social is describing here is not the situation faced by all labs in Canada, but it does describe the situation faced by far too many. And, it's all down to one simple thing: the feds don't find the tri-councils enough!
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Nancy Kanwisher @nancykanwisher.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
1. Make sure you are registered 2. Pester friends to also check their registration 3. Donate to swingleft.org/funds 4. Attend No Kings Sat October 17. Plan is not necessarily to break records on crowd size, but to get people to VOTE EARLY! 5. Make noise!
swingleft.org
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Nancy Kanwisher @nancykanwisher.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
@timothysnyder.bsky.social: the midterm elections are "probably the most consequential since the 18th century... a victory of the opposition is a prerequisite for the maintenance of the rule of law and anything resembling political democracy.” So VOTE Early, encourage friends to do the same, and
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Eliezyer de Oliveira @eliezyer.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
After a long journey through review, our paper is finally out in Nature Communications. We started with a simple problem: The visual cortex is strongly modulated by movement. So how can it represent the visual world without movement interfering with everything? www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Aidan Horner @aidanhorner.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
We're hiring! The York Neuroimaging Centre (YNiC) is looking for a Senior Technical Specialist to support & develop MRI. This is a new role to reflect our commitment to pushing forward MRI research at York. Come join the team! jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/seni... #neurojobs #neuroskyence #psychscisky
jobs.york.ac.uk
Jobs - The University of York
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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A new artificial life paper from our Paradigms of Intelligence team, this one led by @kjha02.bsky.social. 🧬 It explores the co-evolution of cooperation and self-replication, with interesting implications for how shared energy budgets can shape these dynamics. 🧪
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P(aul) Frazee @pfrazee.com · 10/09/2026
Demand DCs use renewable energy. Demand access to open weight models. Learn how to use AI effectively to do things you couldn't otherwise. Dont fire strays at friends
a guy saying "fuck your slop" shooting at ai companies (who dont care). the bullet reflects back and hits a guy holding something syaing "hey guys check out this thing I made"
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Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
This is a great idea, well-done @evansolomon.bsky.social ! #AI #Canada
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Nathan Lambert @natolambert.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
If you are looking for an alternate viewpoint today, which assumes AI models accelerate the process of AI research, but it doesn't result in rapid RSI and an explosion of near term risks: www.interconnects.ai/p/lossy-self...
interconnects.ai
Lossy self-improvement
The case for why self-improvement is real but it doesn't lead to fast takeoff.
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Ben Hayden @benhayden.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
New paper from the Neurosurgery Research Team at BCM! “Neural geometry in the human hippocampus enables generalization across spatial position and gaze” led by @assiachericoni.bsky.social! 🧵 www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
cell.com
Neural geometry in the human hippocampus enables generalization across spatial position and gaze
Chericoni et al. show that neurons in the human hippocampus track the positions of multiple agents in a simple pursuit-based video game. They identified place codes for each agent and for gaze. The co...
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Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
For decades, dreaming has been hypothesized to contribute to emotional memory processing. Here, we investigated how reactivating highly emotional autobiographical memories prior to sleep affects dream content and subsequent emotional appraisal of these memories. #sleeppeeps #psychscisky 🧠🟦
academic.oup.com
Experimentally Manipulating Dream Content by Reactivating a Remote Emotional Memory
This research demonstrates that reactivating remote emotional memories before sleep influences subsequent dream emotions. Notably, we found no evidence tha
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Earl K. Miller @earlkmiller.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Neural activity is often summarized as a small number of shared patterns (low-dimensional structure). sliceTCA offers a more complete and efficient way to uncover meaningful structure in large-scale brain recordings. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience
nature.com
Dimensionality reduction beyond neural subspaces with slice tensor component analysis - Nature Neuroscience
Neural activity does not always lie in a low-dimensional subspace. The authors extend this classic view to show that task-relevant information is distributed across multiple covariability classes and ...
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Ravi Menon @northernthrux.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Fabulous story on @sjo09.bsky.social on turning science fiction into science fact. braincanada.ca/about/news-u...
braincanada.ca
Are Lost Memories Really Gone?
Neuroscientist Sheena Josselyn's research suggests some memories lost to Alzheimer's aren't gone — just hard to access. Learn what her work means for patients and families.
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Andrew Weinstein @andrewjweinstein.com · 09/09/2026
You know who actually did show up at Ground Zero? Canadian emergency rescue crews.
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Mark Carney @mark-carney.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Canada strong is not just about withstanding a crisis. It’s about coming out of it stronger. Watch the new edition of Forward Guidance: youtu.be/eYAwioM3RQI
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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
My impression is this is pretty typical, and its another thing that persuades me that... to be honest... The Cosmopolitan Way Of Life is simply superior. The people throwing the authoritarian temper tantrum are simply those ignorant of its benefits.
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Konrad Kording @kordinglab.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Cool cool. Let’s not obsess about dimensionality. Good motto in a 1/f world!
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