SubiculumCode

A completely off-topic anecdote, then a completely unfounded fear based on a clear misunderstanding of this research. If companies ever start making us live in a MRI machine so they can reliably activate brain areas with certain stimuli, I think there is a bigger problem we are having.

Here is how I see it. This type of research helps us understand the brain, helps us do things like model potential surgery sites better (e.g. for seizure activity interventions). What it does not do is become the basis for mind reading.

Just so that you know that I am not totally unsympathetic to your apparent worldview, let me tell you how I think your concern might actually play out:

AI continues to get more powerful, and computer brain interfaces begin to move beyond EEG scalp electrodes, but begins to take the form or brain augmentation via integrating networked AI compute into implanted chips with electrode neural interfaces, where our brain's neurons and the neural interfaces learn to speak each other's language (i.e. integrate). I can actually see this happening within 20 years. At first, it would be our brain using this augmentation for greater intelligence, etc. However, remote manipulation of the interface could reverse control of brain activity, leading exactly to your fear.

But this research? This is light years from that,,,so much so that it is not even relevant to bring up unless you are just against all technology.

Oh you are right. Let's just end neuroscience altogether. Also computer science, aerospace, and biology in general. In fact, let's go full Amish. Wait, no. Someone might use a buggy cart to run people over.

What exactly is your new fear here?

yeah. This is one of those things where they used previously collected data, built a model that has validity on modeling validity between simulation and actual brain (encoding model for digital twin), then built a new model using the encoding model that tries to reliably activate particular brain regions. The next obvious step is to validate this back to the original person, but they will need to collect new data, and so likely, will need to get research funding. One step at a time.

The digital twin types of models will become more and more useful, but I don't think we will be at the point where all research will be done entirely within these models.

They can be fun to play with btw: https://www.thevirtualbrain.org/tvb/zwei/ and they don't require a beast of a machine to run.

A. Unless you think that brain science is immoral science, then I do not see any problem with this kind of research. As a neuroscientist, I strongly object to the insinuation as unfounded.

B. "Digital twins" e.g. [1] are a growing class of brain simulations that can successfully approximate brain activity patterns at large scale. I think these can be very useful, but we shouldn't think that they are at the level of actually simulating a brain. They are usually made of model neuronal approximative simulations (e.g. integrate and fire, balancing excitatory and inhibitatory neural populations within units), then using diffusion imaging to estimate white matter axonal wiring between those populations from the subject to increase the accuracy of the simulation. These are increasingly being used to, for example, model how a surgical intervention would effect seizure propagation prior to actual surgery. Here is a nice episode of Theoretical Neuroscience podcast [2] on the Virtual Brain [3], one of the available models for this kind of work.

C. In terms of validation. Only partly. From my quick read, this NEVO model optimized neural response only in the digital twin encoding model. While the digital twin model reportedly has solid predictive validity [4], which by the way was not the Virtual Brain model I mentioned in point B. Moreover, the outputs looked neurobiologically plausible, but at this point, there is no independent model or new fMRI showing the optimized stimuli actually drive the target regions. This was performed using previously collected fMRI data, and full validation of this model *IS* the obvious next step, but the money to collect such data does not come from nowhere: funding will be needed, and such a paper as this can help them get it.

D. A final point I'd make. We have long been able to create static stimuli that we can be fairly certain will activate above baseline certain brain regions, on average. Certain stimuli-region pairs ar emore homogenous between people, others e.g. the fusiform face area (FFA), are small enough that individual differences prevent a simple ROI approach, and identification depends on using face stimuli to identify at the individual level, but for the most part, it is reliably locatable. Brain activations are very coarse things. In fMRI, you are talking about ~3x3x3mm voxels (27mm^3) where the hemodynamic responses have a ton of spatial autocorrelation, or in EEG, where the surface spatial area of the reeptive fields are very large(~400 mm^2). These virtual twin models already do a decent job of modeling dynamics of the brain there parameters are tuned to *at this scale*..but this scale does not have a ton of information content. Automating this with video content is not that much a reach.

[1] https://spj.science.org/doi/10.34133/icomputing.0055 [2] https://theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn23/ [3] https://www.thevirtualbrain.org/tvb/zwei/ [4] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.22.664908v2....

Ahh, I remember hearing that before, and it makes general sense too.

Excuse my ignorance. Could one just say, "One expert is all I can handle" and strip the others from the model?

thank you.

The US was not brought down to its knees. That is propaganda speaking, not reality. Jeez.

I sometimes wonder if they are leaving their best models for purely internal use. They are after regular users, integration locking with their full stack lock-in...having the best AI public might not add much to that play...just good enough for most people...while their internal models can help their company achieve faster production.. idk

the title was flamebait, but its true for him...and for me. I do neuroimaging. It won't answer any question / coding task having to do with data analysis / statistical analysis. etc. It IS useless, for me.

I absolutely have been unable to use Fable for any neuroimaging work. Its fine. The other models are good enough, honestly...and while I AM annoyed that the filter is so broad, I also understand it, as I do believe that models can become dangerous as WMDs, eventually. Still, it is completely useless for me.

The only question I had was being flagged for other reasons, so I asked it a mechanical engineering question, and it was just fine with that.

Funny, the cheerleading at HN for leading Chinese models, but a non Chinese lab (building on top of a Chinese model) gets dissed here.

Link for this?

Up and out the back door, any 'ol time.

kokoro is very nice, but I am disappointed that this wasn't an announcement of a new kokoro version.

and without the https:?

I am not going to request access. Fix your link

And because they cancel them after one season?

Following the Ukraine war has basically made me flinch at the sight and sound of drones.

Since that ideal is not ever going to be a reality unless every human is dead, I'll treat that as a deflection. Having to govern means throwing away fantasies and working with the world we actually live in to protect our actually very real families.

Yes. Right now...because the U.S. had the biggest baddest military that the world had ever known. If we had not had that, someone else would have made one. It's one thing to forgo an option that does not seem viable versus expecting the same decision when it is.

Pretty much, lol. I started to say some other things but decided to say less.

The link to the actual paper was appreciated. The context of whether findings will generalize outside of mouse models can depend a lot on specifics of the problem.

High impact journal for an interesting study that is admittedly largely out of my area of expertise. The limitation of it being done in animal models, is of course, noted, but also expected. The question I would ask is how well the underlying background research makes this outcome expected.

This is not Dune 2000 ? https://www.openra.net/download/#linux

No, the topic was about Alibaba and Anthropic.

There is this mistaken idea out there that if the U.S. were to disarm, then other nations would also disarm, and the whole world would live in peace. But history tells us over and over that power abhors a vacuum, and were the U.S. to leave the world, another would take its place, probably Russia or China. If we disarmed, then another nation with arms will inevitably invade the U.S.

Or defense.

There is no reason for you to make personal attacks like that. Not on HN.

Moreover, your take on Dario is over simplistic, and undersells the extent to which Anthropic takes seriously safety. It's not lip service, there are real dollars and attention spent on alignment at Anthropic.

Yeah, binning conscious and unconscious as two categorical classes is probably wrong. There are likely gradations, especially in the context of working memory over time.