I’ve just had a grant costed at 1.7x salary at Leeds. And I, clearly mistakenly, thought that must be pushing the limits..

💯 Great to see!

Very much agree with you that they have these troubles, and are important to focus on. But I think the disagreement becomes about strength of evidence (not no evidence) which is largely an emotional call. Hence why we need a peer review jury! :)

So, being provocative, I’d ask if any of the qualitatively different approaches you mention can learn non-trivial things (which has to be important for a model of the mind). I agree with you re explaining (see above). But the point is our best model of intelligence also v naturally shares redundancy

The neuropsych observations are interesting and valid, but aren’t inconsistent with PDP models. They could (imo do) just point to learning dynamics & resource pressures shaping the circuitry. Combined with PDP they generate hypothesis that can be tested. And this is true of other model approaches.

I’m a bit confused reading this. Redundancy e.g. to cell loss is not a smoking gun but it certainly is evidence *supporting* PDP models as being a good model of the brain. If the reverse was true we would v likely discard ANNs as models as redundancy is such a basic issue in experimental neuro.

Can I register without booking a room? I’m based in Leeds!

Thanks!

Yes exactly! Not sure how it would play out in implementation. But I can see a role in providing an enriched learning objective for a mech model as the foundation model has extracted and compressed into a representation what is meaningful in the neural data.

Do you see a usecase in distilling the neural-structure understanding of foundational models into a mechanistic model?

Congratulations Guillaume!

Can you point me to one or two? I don’t see anywhere where you say why language isn’t one?

My take is that language is compressing information about the world. Eg take a newspaper article. How is that not an encoding of reality?