Michael Thornton retweetledi
i just finished reading a study published in Nature in January by researchers from McGill & Harvard and it broke my brain a little
they tracked neurons in the hippocampus over several weeks while mice were learning a complex task and what they found is wild
the hippocampus does way more than store memories like a hard drive, it actively reorganizes them to predict what’s going to happen next, the neurons literally rewire their firing timing to start shooting BEFORE a reward shows up instead of after your brain is basically running a real time simulation of the future built entirely from past experience
and this is where it gets crazy when you think about AI
every foundation model we have right now learns through backpropagation which is a math trick from the 1980s that has absolutely nothing to do with how actual neurons learn, it works absurdly well but it’s also why training GPT-5 burns hundreds of millions of dollars & eats the energy of a small city
your brain does something arguably more impressive on 20 watts which is literally a light bulb
how? because the brain runs on predictive coding, it predicts what’s about to happen at every single moment and only bothers transmitting the stuff it got wrong, everything it predicted correctly gets suppressed
evolution basically invented the most insane compression algorithm imaginable and we’ve been pretending it doesn’t exist for decades
the most fascinating part is that tomorrow’s AI will look absolutely nothing like what we know today:
sparse event driven predictive architectures running on a fraction of current energy & the thing is the solution has been sitting inside your skull for 600 million years, evolution already did the work except nobody in this industry wants to face it because it’s easier to throw billions at compute than to sit down and study how a mouse brain outperforms everything with a light bulb
we’re spending billions reinventing the wheel when a mouse brain already outperforms our best models on the energy of a nightlight, the day this industry sits down & seriously studies what’s happening between our ears everything changes
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