How to Pursue a Career in Brain-Based AI

[exdsq]

Was hoping for something a little deeper than "Personal projects", "blog", "read books", and "go to relevant conferences". But then I noticed it was written by a content marketer and not a 'Brain-Based AI' engineer.

I wonder how many members of their team have a background similar to what this article suggests (rather than PhDs and MScs in the field).

Edit: Didn't have to wonder too long, they're hiring interns and would like PhD students with a history of publishing at relevant conferences. So they themselves wouldn't hire an intern based on their own advice!

[codelord]

As a machine learning researcher for over a decade I clicked to understand what "brain-based AI" is. I learned it's a made-up term by the author to maximize click-through rate. Pass.

[SubiculumCode]

classic numenta TM

[Mageek]

This is an area that a lot of people are probably interested in. We still don't really have practical robots, self-driving cars, and personal assistants, and some sort of general context-sensitive learning intelligence breakthrough is needed to get us there. Traditional machine learning and deep learning have not yet been sufficient to get us there, and brain-based approaches might. It would be good to hear about more of the companies pursuing this sort of thing (maybe with less of a focus on brains and more of a focus on general understanding), and how to proactively contribute beyond the numenta-specific content here. Its a start though!

[mcbuilder]

A lot of computational neuroscience guys are in DL now, myself included. Hard to do basic research when you're not funded, and there is this new shiny thing with million dollar compute.

[knodi123]

can you answer a noob question I've always wondered?

Is there any reason AI research has to run at fast speeds? Like, any modern learning model that you're researching with could certainly run on a million dollar gpu farm or whatever.... but it could also run on a macbook in 1000x the time, right? And isn't that enough speed to determine whether your algorithms are performing the way you expect, even if they aren't fast enough to do fun interactive stuff like realtime video or whatever?

[lootsauce]

Saw Jeff Hawkins talk at Streangeloop years ago, and I thought his book was brilliant. What has this company ever accomplished in machine learning/ai? I have seen a few videos on YouTube teaching about HMT theory but it’s not clear that this theory even results in anything that is even marginally useful. What am I missing?

[Alex_Notchenko]

In modern deep learning there are multiple approaches that can be argued are close to some of inspirations from neuroscience: Capsule Networks, Helmholtz Machines, Energy Based Models (Score Based Generative Modeling / Diffusion Models), Associative Memory.

Information theory, Bayesian methods, Approximate Computations are more relevant for inspiration. Neuroscience is not the filed which studies intelligent behavior.

[hprotagonist]

> What am I missing?

Not much!

[zyrtech]

Yeah, Numenta is not going anywhere. DL has taken over the serious applications a while back, and Numenta doesn't have anything really substantial to offer compared to DL.

[JonChesterfield]

There's a company based in Switzerland doing this sort of thing. Unfortunately I've forgotten the name, was spun out of some academic research.