YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Marblestone

lines on the record: 144
first: 2025-12-30
most recent: 2025-12-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Much. Where can people find your stuff? Pleasure. The easiest way now, my Adam Marbleson.org website is currently down, I guess. You can find convergent research.org can link to a lot of the stuff we've been doing. Yeah.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think you need scale in many of the domains of science. And that does not mean that the low scale work is not important. It does not mean that the kind of creativity, serendipity, et cetera, each student pursuing a totally different direction or thesis that you see in universities is not also really key. But yeah, I think we need some amount of scalable infrastructure is missing in essentially every area of science, even math, which is crazy because mathematicians, I thought, just needed whiteboards. Right. Yeah.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the full diversity of fields in which that exists? We've even now found. And which are the fields that do or don't need that? So, fields that have had gazillions of dollars of investment, do they still need some of those? Do they still have some of those gaps? Or is it only more neglected fields? We're even finding some interesting ones in actual astronomy, actual telescopes that have not been explored, maybe because of the kind of Um... If you're getting above a critical mass size project, then you have to have a really big project, and that's a more bureaucratic process with the federal agencies.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that in the aggregate process, things like lean are actually surprising because I did start from sort of neuroscience and biology. And it was very obvious that they're sort of like these omics. We need genomics, but you also need connectomics. And we can engineer E. coli, but we also need to engineer the other cells. And there's somewhat obvious parts of biological infrastructure. I did not realize that math proving infrastructure, like And so, and that was kind of like emergent from trying to do this. So I'm looking forward to seeing other things where it's like not actually this hard intellectual problem to solve it. It's maybe the kind of slightly the equivalent of AI researchers just need a GPUs or something like that and focus and really good PyTorch code to start doing this.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, I think I've talked about this before, but I think one thing is just like, Kind of like the overall size or shape of it, or something like that is like a few hundred fundamental capabilities So, if each of these was like a deep tech startup size project, that's like only a few billion dollars or something. Each one of those was a series A, that's only a trillion dollars to solve these gaps. It's lower than that. And so that's one, maybe we assumed that and we also came to that's what we got. It's not really comprehensive. It's really just a way of summarizing a lot of conversations we've had with scientists.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Map is basically just like a list of a lot of those things, and it's like we call it a gap map. I think it's actually more like a fundamental capabilities map. Like, what are all these things like mini Hubble Space Telescopes? And then we kind of organize that into gaps for helping people understand that or like. Search that.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talk to a lot of scientists, and some of the scientists were just like, here's the next thing my graduate student will do, here's what I find interesting exploring these really interesting hypothesis spaces, like all the types of things we've been talking about. And some of them are like, here's this gap. I need this piece of infrastructure, which like there's no combination of a grad students in my lab or me loosely collaborating with other labs with traditional grants that could ever get me that. I need to have like an organized engineering team that builds the miniature equivalent of the Hubble Space Telescope. And if I can build that Hubble Space Telescope, then I will unblock all the other researchers in my field or some path of technological progress in the way that the Hubble Space Telescope lifted the boats, improved the life of every astronomer, but wasn't really an astronomy discovery in itself. It was just like you had to put this giant mirror in space with a CCD camera and organize all the people in engineering and stuff to do that. So some of the things we talk to scientists about look like that. And so the gap.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the gap map. So, in the process of incubating and coming up with these focus research organizations, these sort of nonprofit startup-like moonshots that we've been getting philanthropists and now government agencies to fund.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mostly I would just do data collection. It's like really, really unbiased data collection. So all the other people can figure out these.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Attention this just based on kind of reflexes and stuff like that. So I don't know. I mean, I think that there's not just the cortex, there's also the thalamus. The thalamus is also involved in kind of somehow relaying or gating information. So there's cortical cortical connections. There's also some amount of connection between cortical areas that goes through the thalamus. Is it possible that this is doing some sort of matching or kind of constraint satisfaction or matching across keys over here and values over there? Is it possible that they can do stuff like that? Maybe I don't know. This is all part of what's the architecture of this cortical thalamic system. I don't know how transformer-like it is or if there's anything analogous to that attention. Be interesting to find out”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, we definitely have weights and activations. Whether you can use the activations in these clever ways. Different forms of like actual attention, like attention in the brain. Is that based on I'm trying to pay attention? I think there's probably several different kinds of like actual attention in the brain. I want to pay attention to this area of visual cortex. I want to pay attention to The content in other areas that is triggered by the content in this area, right?”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kinds of sequences it's storing how is it organizing representing that how is it replaying it back what is it replaying back how is it exactly how that memory consolidation works in i was sort of training the cortex using replays or memories from the hippocampus or something like that um there's probably some of that stuff there might be multiple timescales of plasticity or sort of clever learning rules that can kind of, I don't know, can sort of simultaneously kind of be storing sort of short-term information and also doing backprop with it. I mean, neurons may be doing a couple of things, you know, some fast weight plasticity and some slower plasticity at the same time or synapses that have many states. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think that from a neuroscience perspective, I'm not sure that I've seen something that's super clear on what continual learning, what causes it, except maybe to say that this systems consolidation idea of sort of hippocampus consolidating cortex, like some people think is a big piece of this.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so continual learning. I don't know. I think that there's probably things that. There's probably some at the architectural level, there's probably something interesting stuff that the hippocampus is doing. And people have long thought this.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm pretty much at a loss on this one. I don't know. Max Hodak has been giving talks about this recently. He's another really... Hardcore neuroscience person neurotechnology person. And the thing I mentioned with Doriso is maybe also, it sounds like it might have some touching on this question. But yeah, I think this I don't think anybody has any idea. It might even involve new physics. It's like, you know, yeah.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My Hunches is going to be a huge mess, and we should look at the architecture as the loss functions in the learning rules, and we shouldn't really, I don't expect it to be pretty in there. Yeah.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And basically, I just don't know if we have that machinery or if it's more like cost functions and architectures that make some of that approximately emerge, but maybe it would also emerge in a neural net. There's a bunch of interesting neuroscience research trying to study this, what the representations look like. But what was your hunch?”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't know. I mean, I think there's some amount of study of this. I mean, there's these things like face patch neurons that represent certain parts of the face that geometrically combine in interesting ways. That's sort of with geometry and vision. Is that true for other more abstract things? There's this idea of cognitive maps. A lot of the stuff that a rodent hippocampus has to learn is like place cells and where is the rodent going to go next and is it going to get a reward there is like very geometric and like do we organize concepts with like a abstract version of a spatial map There's some questions of can we do like true symbolic operations like can I have like a register in my brain that copies a variable to the another register regardless of what the content of that that variable is that's like this variable binding problem”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Equations those might be very complex equations, but if you can just get insanely good at just auto proving these things with cleverness, auto cleverness, can you have explicitly interpretable world models as opposed to neural net world models and move back basically to symbolic methods just because you can just have insane amount of ability to prove things Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting vision. I don't know how, you know, in the next 10 years, like whether that will be the vision that plays out, but I think it's really interesting. To think about, yeah, and even for math, I mean, I think Terry Towers. Which are the ones that got proved in, which are the ones that didn't? Okay, well, that's like the landscape of all the theorems instead of one theorem at a time.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a universal language. It's provable. And it's also provable from are you trying to exploit me, are you sending me some Some message that's actually trying to like sort of hack into my brain effectively. Are you trying to socially influence me? Are you actually just setting me just the information that I need and no more for this? And yeah, so David, who's like this program director at ARIA now in the UK, I mean, he has this whole design of a kind of ARPA style program of sort of safeguarded AI that very heavily leverages like provable safety properties. And can you apply proofs to have a world model, but that world model is actually not specified just in neuron activations, but it's specified in”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of us will come up with a quantum theory of gravity instead of like a card carrying physicist in the same way that Steve Burns is like reading the neuroscience literature and he hasn't been in the neuroscience lab that much, but he's able to synthesize across the neuroscience literature and be, oh, learning subsystems, steering subsystem, does this all make sense? It's kind of like he's an outsider, a neuroscientist in some ways. Can you have outsider string theorists or something because the math is just done for them by the computer? And does that lead to more innovation in string theory? Right? Maybe yes.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I guess there's some worry that people don't learn the mechanics and therefore don't build grounded intuitions or something. But my hunch is it's like super positive exactly on net how useful that will be or how much overall math breakthroughs or like math breakthroughs even that we care about will happen. I don't know. I mean, one other thing that I think is cool is actually the accessibility question. It's like, okay, that sounds a little bit corny. Okay, yeah, more people can do math, but who cares? But I think there's actually lots of people that could have interesting ideas, like maybe the quantum theory of gravity or something.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so at what point is that applying? Is vibe coding? Are people not learning computer science or actually are they like vibe coding and they're also simultaneously looking at the LLM with like explaining them these abstract computer science concepts and it's all just like all happening faster? Their feedback loop is faster and they're learning way more abstract computer science and algorithm stuff because their vibe coding, you know, I don't know. It's not obvious that might be something the user interface and the human infrastructure around it.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People could do it, progress was more grinding and slow and lonely, and so on. You had more false failures because you didn't get something about the assembly code right rather than the essential thing of like, it was your concept right. Harder to collaborate and stuff like that. And so I think it will be really good. There is some worry that by not learning to do the mechanical parts of the proof that you fail to generate the intuitions that inform the more conceptual parts, the creative part, right?”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I think of it as maybe a little bit like the when everybody had to write assembly code or something like that. Just like the amount of fun, like cool startups that got created was a lot less or something, right? And so it was just like.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of reasons you could say that what's going on in this part of the memory over here, which is supposed to be the part the user can access, can't in any way affect what's going on in the memory over here or something like that Yeah, things like that. Yeah.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very academically flavored often, although there was like this DARPA program that made approvably secure quadcopter helicopter and stuff like that.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What security specs should I be specifying? Is this the spec that I wanted? So there's a spec for And it's just been really complex and hard, but it's only just in the last very short time that the LLMs are able to generate verifiable proofs of things that are useful to mathematicians, starting to be able to do some amount of that for software verification, hardware verification. But I think if you project the trends over the next couple years, Possible that it just flips the tide that formal methods based this whole field of formal methods or formal verification, provable software, which is kind of this weird, almost like backwater of more like theoretical part of programming languages and stuff.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's starting to. Yeah, I think it's starting to. I think that one challenge, and we are actually incubating a potential focus research organization on this, is the specification problem. So mathematicians kind of know what interesting theorems they want to formalize. If I have some code, let's say I have some code that is involved in running the power grid or something and it has some security properties. What is the formal speck of those properties? The power grid engineers just made this thing, but they don't necessarily know how to lift the formal spec from that. And it's not necessarily easy to come up with the spec that is the spec that you want for your code. People aren't used to coming up with formal specs, and there are not a lot of tools for it. So you also have this kind of user interface plus AI problem of like.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can use the same lean and same proof to do formally verified software. I think that's going to be a really powerful piece of cybersecurity that's relevant for all sorts of other AI hacking the world stuff. And that, yeah, if you can prove a Riemann hypothesis, you're also going to be able to prove insanely complex things about very complex software. And then you'll be able to ask the LLM synthesize me a software that is I can prove is correct, right?”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We get mechanical proof of the Riemann hypothesis or something like that, or things like that, maybe. I don't know. I don't know enough details of how hard these things are to search for. I'm not sure anyone can fully predict that, just as we couldn't exactly predict when Go would be solved or something like that. And I think it's going to have lots of really cool applied applications. So one of the things you want to do is you want to have provably stable, secure, unhackable, et cetera, software. So you can write math proofs about software and say this code not only does it pass these unit tests, but I can mathematically prove that there's no way to hack it in these ways or no way to mess with the memory or this type of things that hackers use or it has these properties.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, generating all the other statements given that you know this one or stuff like that. Or if you add this, how does it affect the complexity of the rest of the kind of network of proofs? So, can you make a loss function that adds, oh, I want this proof to be a really highly powerful proof? I think some people are trying to work on that. So maybe you can automate the creativity part. If you had true AGI, it would do everything a human can do, so it would also do the things that the creative mathematicians do. But way barring that, I think just RLVRing the crap out of proofs, well, I think that's going to be just a really useful tool for mathematicians that can accelerate math a lot and change it a lot, but not necessarily immediately change everything about it.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have short passive inference to all the other ones, and it's a short, compact statement. So it's like a powerful explanation that explains all the rest of math. And like part of what math is doing is like making these compact. Things that explain the other things”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of what strategies you use to do proofs. I think this will shift the burden of that so that humans don't have to do a lot of the mechanical parts of math validating lemmas and proofs and checking if the statement of this in this paper is exactly the same as that paper and stuff like that. That will just work. If you really think we're going to get all these things we've been talking about, real AGI, it would also be able to make conjectures. And Benjio has like a paper as more like theoretical paper. There are probably a bunch of other papers emerging about this. Like, is there a loss function for good explanations or good conjectures? That's like a pretty profound question, right? A math, a really interesting math proof or statement might be one that can compresses lots of information about other, you know, has lots of implications for lots of other theorems. Otherwise, you would have to prove those theorems using long, complex passive inference. Here, if you have this theorem, this theorem is correct.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just keep working. It seems like the couple billion dollar at least one billion dollar valuation company harmonic based on this alpha proof is based on this. A couple other emerging really interesting companies. I think that this problem of like RLVRing the crap out of math proving is basically going to work. And we will be able to have things that search for proofs and find them. in the same way that we have AlphaGo or what have you that can search for ways of playing the game of Go and with that verifiable signal works. So does this like solve math? There is still the part that has to do with conjecturing new interesting ideas. There's still the kind of conceptual organization of math of what is interesting. How do you come up with new theorem statements in the first place? Or even like the very high level breakdown.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Result. But if Lean says it's correct, it's just correct. So it makes it easy for collaboration to happen. But it also makes it easy for correctness of proofs to be an RL signal in very much RLVR. It's like a perfect math proofing is now formalized math proving. So formal means that's like expressed in something like lean and verifiable, mechanically verifiable. That becomes a perfect RLVR task. Yeah, and I think that that is going to just”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I think that there are parts of math that it seems like it's. Pretty well on track To automate. And that has to do with like, so first of all, so Lean had been developed for a number of years at Microsoft and other places has become one of the convergent focused research organizations to kind of drive more engineering and focus onto it. So Lean is like this language programming language where instead of expressing your math proof on pen and paper, you express it in this programming language lean. And then at the end, If you do that that way, it is a verifiable language so that you can basically click verify and lean will tell you whether the conclusions of your proof actually follow perfectly from your assumptions of your proof. So it checks whether the proof is correct automatically just like by itself this is useful for mathematicians collaborating and stuff like that. If I'm some amateur mathematician I want to add to a proof, you know, Terry Tau is not going to like believe my”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And our learning system also has to predict the steering subsystem as an auxiliary task. And that helps the steering substance. Now the steering subsystem can access that predictor and build a cool reward function using it. Yes.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so Gurn, anyway, had this long ago blog post of like, oh, this is like an intermediate thing. We talk about whole brain emulation. We talk about AGI. Augmented, brain data augmented. Thing that's trained on all your behavior, but is also trained on predicting some of your neural patterns.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in addition to predicting the label, the vector of labels like yes cat, not dog, yes, not boat, you know, one-shot vector or whatever of one hot vector of yes, it's cat instead of these gazillion other categories, let's say in this simple example, you're also predicting a vector, which is like all these brain signal measurements.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the kind of distillation. This is doing something a little different. This is basically just saying I'm adding an auxiliary. I think of as regularization or I think of it as adding an auxiliary loss function that sort of smoothing out the prediction task to also always be consistent with how the brain represents it.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you do distillation of one model into another, that is a certain thing you are just trying to copy one model into another. I think that we don't really have a Perfect proposal to like distill the brain. I think to distill the brain, you need a much more complex brain interface. Maybe you could also do that. You could make surrogate models. Andreas Tolias and people like that are doing some amount of neural network surrogate models of brain activity data instead of having your visual cortex do the computation just have the surrogate models into a neural network to some degree.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever can do this, it is harder to generate lots and lots of brain activity patterns that correspond to things that you want to train the AI to do. But again, this is just a technological limitation of neuroscience. If every iPhone was also a brain scanner, you would not have this problem and we would be training AI with the brain signals. It's just the order in which technology is developed is that we got GPUs before we got portable brain scanners or whatever, right? that kind of thing.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a limited amount of information per label that you're putting in. It's just cat or dog. What if I also had predict what is my neural activity pattern when I see a cat or when I see a dog and all the other things? If you add that as like an auxiliary loss function or an auxiliary prediction task, does that sculpt the network to know the information that humans know about cats and dogs and to represent it in a way that's consistent with how the brain represents it and the kind of representational dimensions or geometry of how the brain represents things as opposed to just having these labels? Does that let it generalize better? Does that let it have just richer labeling? And of course, that's sounds really challenging. It's very easy to generate lots and lots of labeled cat pictures with scale AI or”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Yeah. I mean, actually, this is funny because I think that the first time I saw this idea, it was I think it actually might have been in a blog post by Guern. There's always a Gordon blog post. And there are now academic research efforts in some amount of emerging company type efforts to try to do this. So normally let's say I'm training an image classifier or something like that. I show it pictures of cats and dogs or whatever, and they have the label cat or dog. And I have a neural net that's supposed to predict the label cat or dog or something like that.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To have a moonshot company kind of go wrong and not do the actual science. But there also may be ways to have companies or big corporate labs get involved and actually do it correctly.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quarter Yes, yes, moonshot startups or billion dollar back startups, moonshot startups, I see as a kind of on a continuum with Froze. Froze are a way of channeling philanthropic support and ensuring that it's open source public benefit, various other things that may be properties of a given fro. But yes, billionaire-backed startups, if they can target the right science, the exact right science, I think there's a lot of ways to do moonshot neuroscience companies that would never get you the connecto. He was like, oh, we're going to upload the brain or something, but never actually get the mouse connectome or something, these fundamental things that you need to get to ground truth to science. There are lots of ways”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You should I sort of tried a little bit like seven or eight years ago, and there was not a lot of interest, and maybe now there would be. But yeah, I mean, I think all the things that we've been talking about, like. I think it's really fun to talk about, but it's ultimately speculation. What is the actual reason for the energy efficiency of the brain, for example? Is it doing real inference or amortized inference or something else? This is all going to be answerable by neuroscience. It's going to be hard, but it's actually answerable. And so if you can only do that for low billions of dollars or something to really comprehensively solve that, it seems to me in the grand scheme of trillions of dollars of GPUs and stuff, it actually... Makes sense to do that investment.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is very TBD and very much evolving in some sense as we speak. I'm hearing some rumors going around of connectomics related companies potentially forming. So far, E11 has been philanthropy. The National Science Foundation just put out this call for tech labs, which is basically somewhat of it as kind of fro inspired or related. I think you could have a tech lab for actually going and mapping the mouse brain with this. And that would be sort of philanthropy plus government still in a nonprofit kind of open source framework. But can companies accelerate that? Can you credibly link Connectomics to AI in the context of a company and get investment for that? It's like possible”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Y11 with the focus research organization started with technology development rather than starting with saying we're going to do a human brain or something, let's just brute force it. We said, let's get the cost down with new technology. But then you still, it's still a big thing, even with next generation technology, you still need to spend hundreds of millions on data collection.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, yeah, so George Church was my PhD advisor and basically. Yeah, I mean, what he's pointed out is that, yeah, it was $3 billion or something, roughly $1 per base pair for the first genome. And then the National Human Genome Research Institute basically structured the funding process right, and they got a bunch of companies competing to lower the cost. And then the cost dropped like a million fold in 10 years because they changed the paradigm from kind of macroscopic kind of chemical techniques to these individual DNA molecules make a little cluster of DNA molecules on the microscope and you would see just a few DNA molecules at a time on each pixel of the camera would basically give you a different in parallel looking at different fragments of DNA. So you parallelize the thing by like millions fold and that's what reduced the cost by millions fold. And yeah, so I mean essentially with switching from electron microscopy to optical connectomics potentially even future types of connectomics technology we think there should be similar patterns.”
2025-12-30 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Adam Marblestone — AI is missing something fundamental about the brain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source