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Blake Richards

@tyrellturing

Researcher at Google and CIFAR Fellow, working on the intersection of machine learning and neuroscience in Montréal (academic affiliations: @mcgill.ca and @mila-quebec.bsky.social).

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Latest posts by Blake Richards @tyrellturing

Thanks @natmesanash.bsky.social for covering our new work, in @thetransmitter.bsky.social!

10.03.2026 19:59 👍 13 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0

As promised. @annaschapiro.bsky.social

09.03.2026 01:20 👍 23 🔁 1 💬 2 📌 0

Indeed, both my grandmothers worked outside of the house. My paternal grandmother stopped when my granddad got a big promotion at some point, but my maternal grandmother worked full-time her entire adult life. (And still handled all the cooking, etc. - so unfair it's hard to imagine!)

09.03.2026 17:33 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Also worth noting that there is fairly clear data showing that what the average family had back then (in terms of size of house, number of cars, number of large appliances, etc.), was very different. We've been conditioned nowadays to expect hyper-consumerism as the norm.

09.03.2026 17:30 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

This didn't happen. The perception that it did is largely based on fictional shows that were about rich people. Much more common was a household where one person (theoretically Dad in a het household) was the higher earner and paid the housing costs and the other paid utilities & food

09.03.2026 15:40 👍 2892 🔁 714 💬 157 📌 148
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How Congress can restore the independence of US science Members must go beyond reinstating US government research spending and re-establish decentralized governance at the National Institutes of Health and other agencies.

The most impt change at #NIH and to US science this year is bigger than grant cancellations— it’s how the agency is governed.

For 75 years NIH has been largely independent of presidential control. That’s changed this year. New piece from me and @nataliebaviles.bsky.social in @nature.com
🧪

09.03.2026 12:26 👍 261 🔁 151 💬 4 📌 4
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Neural geometry in the human hippocampus enables generalization across spatial position and gaze Hippocampal neurons track positions of self, others, and gaze direction. However, it is unclear how their respective neural codes differ enough to avoid confusion while allowing for abstraction. We re...

Compositional representation of self, others, and gaze direction in *human* hippocampus - super cool.

arxiv.org/abs/2603.04747

09.03.2026 13:19 👍 59 🔁 17 💬 0 📌 0

You know those moments when you see research that so well aligns with your personal interests that ask yourself if you went into the wrong scientific field... yeah, that's this for me. 😜

03.03.2026 18:15 👍 23 🔁 5 💬 2 📌 1
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Raccoons optimally forage for information: exploration–exploitation trade-offs in innovation Animals in rapidly changing environments, such as cities, should optimize information gathering to learn about and efficiently forage in these heterog…

Raccoon information seeking! Very cool work on raccoons optimizing information gain in puzzle solving from @sarahba.bsky.social and lab:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

03.03.2026 18:12 👍 28 🔁 7 💬 0 📌 1
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AI Bros Wanted Trump. Now They Learn What Happens When You Tell Him No. Last year, in Fascism For First Time Founders, I warned the tech industry what happens when you cozy up to authoritarians. As I wrote then: Innovation requires trust. Not just between individuals, …

The reason businesses put their money behind liberal democracies is because stable=predictable wealth. That the current batch of wealthy think that they could instead become oligarchs in a fascist dictatorship to make more money was always going to backfire.

www.techdirt.com/2026/03/02/a...

02.03.2026 17:49 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0

Agree this is a very cool paper.

The result is that soma-dendritic mismatch reflects an error (teaching) signal.

Below panel (5e) is key data, supporting the idea that their SD residual approach captures differences in their two populations as a function of the behavioral outcome (error).

26.02.2026 18:36 👍 26 🔁 5 💬 1 📌 1

In 2023 a bill to prevent AI from autonomously launching nuclear weapons *failed to pass*. This was apparently not newsworthy.

www.congress.gov/bill/118th-c...

26.02.2026 18:02 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 1

I think this is a *super* important paper - if this result can be replicated with other regions or tasks then this may come to form our core understanding of credit assignment signals in the neocortex!

#neuroscience 🧪

26.02.2026 15:37 👍 68 🔁 13 💬 2 📌 0
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The Illusion Of AI’s Existential Risk | NOEMA Focusing on the prospect of human extinction by AI in the distant future may prevent us from addressing AI’s disruptive dangers to society today.

3/3) It's weird how snowflakey the AI doom crowd can be, especially on that site. Anyway, I still stand by the article we published on this subject in 2023:

www.noemamag.com/the-illusion...

25.02.2026 18:47 👍 10 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

2/3) Today my notifications had a bunch of snarky, fairly angry replies from some rando guy on tweets I made back in *2021* where I said I didn't think super-intelligent AI killing everyone was the biggest concern, and errors from "dumb AI" being put in sensitive positions would be a bigger risk.

25.02.2026 18:47 👍 8 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

1/3) Occassionally when one of my students posts a paper on X/Twitter I will just go peak to see how it's doing, and I can't help but sometimes look at my notifications at the same time.

That site is such a weird place man...

25.02.2026 18:47 👍 7 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

hey team! I need advice! If there were theoretically an organization whose sole purpose was to systematically identify and break nuisance and stupid IP in the biomedical space, creating shareware equivalents, what would be the highest value targets? e.g., AAV serotypes, antibodies, CRISPR, 1/n

25.02.2026 16:52 👍 12 🔁 7 💬 4 📌 1
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Supernovas blast iron into interstellar space

Isn’t it cool that the iron in our bodies came from a 5 billion year old supernova?

www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...

We are…..literally stardust

(🎤 drop)

#NephJC

25.02.2026 02:05 👍 414 🔁 64 💬 39 📌 5

Or rather, that's an extension of what I said above. I guess my ultimate point is that I usually find 99% of the benefit in terms of my scientific thought comes from the outlining process, not the fine-tuning for reviewers.

24.02.2026 22:09 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0

It's not about speed - my claim is that all of that obsessive editing and refining we do can sometimes actually be *counter* productive vis-a-vis the actual science because it turns us into *salespeople*.

That's why I think the traditional paper model is not useful for shaping our thought.

24.02.2026 22:06 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Totally agree that writing our a paper (or grant) helps to think about the problem.

But, I'm not sure that thinking aide requires all of the obsessive fine-tuning of language and images that we do to impress reviewers.

I think we could obtain the same benefit with stripped down notes/essays.

24.02.2026 21:19 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
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a man wearing headphones is sitting in front of a microphone . ALT: a man wearing headphones is sitting in front of a microphone .

New preprint 📣

Do you use the @alleninstitute.org mouse brain connectome?

In work led by Vikram Nathan we found issues with existing connectome representations, fixed them, showed the impact on connectome measures.

Do you wonder what they are?
Do you wonder what they do?

tinyurl.com/5y9mft4e

24.02.2026 09:22 👍 14 🔁 5 💬 1 📌 1
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Siva Reddy Named 2026 Sloan Research Fellow | Mila Siva Reddy, Core Academic Member at Mila, has received the prestigious 2026 Sloan Research Fellowship, awarded annually to the most promising scientific researchers.

Congratulations to Siva Reddy (@sivareddyg.bsky.social), Core Academic Member at Mila, on being awarded the prestigious 2026 Sloan Research Fellowship. This fellowship recognizes his outstanding contributions to the field and his scientific leadership.

23.02.2026 16:31 👍 6 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom - Nature Ecology & Evolution Using phylogenetic comparative methods across 237 species from disparate phyla, the authors show that species with fast-paced ecologies have higher temporal resolution of perception.

Pace of ecology drives the tempo of visual perception across the animal kingdom www.nature.com/articles/s41... - new paper with Clinton Haarlem, Cliodhna Hynes and colleagues

Different species see the world as fast as they need to...

24.02.2026 10:40 👍 87 🔁 37 💬 4 📌 1

TBH the thing that is most sad about the loss of ~2015-2021 era science twitter is the loss of a public square where grad students can see, and participate in, the diversity of expert opinions in the field. It really shaped how I see science.

23.02.2026 14:41 👍 63 🔁 16 💬 8 📌 1
Screenshot of an article from CBC News. The headline reads: Ottawa puts $50M behind Inuit-led university as part of major announcement for northern communities.

Screenshot of an article from CBC News. The headline reads: Ottawa puts $50M behind Inuit-led university as part of major announcement for northern communities.

Canada’s first Inuit-led university will be a game changer for the North.

23.02.2026 20:00 👍 1756 🔁 355 💬 34 📌 19

I was sure the illusion would break at some length: can't keep grow forever, right?

Wrong. My brain hurts.

23.02.2026 11:18 👍 57 🔁 13 💬 1 📌 2

Excellent thread for grad students to dive into - so much expertise (and diversity of opinion!) in the comments 👇

20.02.2026 22:17 👍 8 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 1

Evidence that our information environment influences our thoughts and views.

It’s an important paper because this kind of thing hasn’t been shown so clearly before. There was the analysis of Facebook data w Facebook permission which showed very little change… 1/

20.02.2026 03:42 👍 24 🔁 6 💬 1 📌 1