BI 198 Tony Zador: Neuroscience Principles to Improve AI

Brain Inspired

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Tony Zador runs the Zador lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. You've heard him on Brain Inspired a few times in the past, most recently in a panel discussion I moderated at this past COSYNE conference - a conference Tony co-founded 20 years ago. As you'll hear, Tony's current and past interests and research endeavors are of a wide variety, but today we focus mostly on his thoughts on NeuroAI.

We're in a huge AI hype cycle right now, for good reason, and there's a lot of talk in the neuroscience world about whether neuroscience has anything of value to provide AI engineers - and how much value, if any, neuroscience has provided in the past.

Tony is team neuroscience. You'll hear him discuss why in this episode, especially when it comes to ways in which development and evolution might inspire better data efficiency, looking to animals in general to understand how they coordinate numerous objective functions to achieve their intelligent behaviors - something Tony calls alignment - and using spikes in AI models to increase energy efficiency.

• Zador Lab
• Twitter: @TonyZador
• Previous episodes:
  • BI 187: COSYNE 2024 Neuro-AI Panel.
  • BI 125 Doris Tsao, Tony Zador, Blake Richards: NAISys
  • BI 034 Tony Zador: How DNA and Evolution Can Inform AI
• Related papers
  • Catalyzing next-generation Artificial Intelligence through NeuroAI.
  • Encoding innate ability through a genomic bottleneck.
• Essays
  • NeuroAI: A field born from the symbiosis between neuroscience, AI.
  • What the brain can teach artificial neural networks.

Read the transcript.

0:00 - Intro 3:28 - "Neuro-AI" 12:48 - Visual cognition history 18:24 - Information theory in neuroscience 20:47 - Necessary steps for progress 24:34 - Neuro-AI models and cognition 35:47 - Animals for inspiring AI 41:48 - What we want AI to do 46:01 - Development and AI 59:03 - Robots 1:25:10 - Catalyzing the next generation of AI