Dwarkesh Patel published a fascinating interview with former DeepMind researcher Adam Marblestone, co-founder and CEO of Convergent Research, a philanthropic incubator organization for cutting-edge R&D.
It’s quite the rollercoaster about all things neuro-AI: probabilistic inference, cortical layers, brain regions, reinforcement learning, genetics, connectomics, mathematics, continual learning, neural architecture, and more.
Transcript: Adam Marblestone – AI is missing something fundamental about the brain
TBP is not mentioned directly, but there are strong hints. Marblestone praises the book A Brief History of Intelligence by TBP board member Max Bennett, and repeatedly references the work of AI researcher Steven Byrnes, who credited Hawkins as a major source of inspiration.
Byrnes works at the Astera Institute, which seems to approach AI with a mindset similar to the TBP:
- Charting a path in a world with thinking machines - Astera
- Neuroscientist Doris Tsao joins Astera to lead its new neuroscience program - Astera
An X user generated an infographic of Byrnes’ ideas discussed by Marblestone:
