RIP Jim Simons

📜✨ New paper out!

In this jww Owen Lynch and David Spivak we introduce 'open energy-driven systems', which are a broad class of differential systems which evolve by generalised gradient flow

My brilliant trainee Piotr Sokol (Piotr Sokol) PhD is on the job market! He's an expert in machine learning, differential geometry, dynamical systems / stochastic processes, and lover of manifolds and algebra.

Apocalyptic Brexit was always the wrong call - the boring truth is we're just gonna be a bit poorer forever. Mundane misery. It obviously wouldn't resolve the social contradictions its fantasist supporters hoped for, and we obviously were never gonna be Singapore-on-the-Atlantic.

Just published a video explanation on the role self-organization plays in modern language models!

hope you like it:
youtu.be/cGcY-ReeGDU

Really excited about this paper, featuring brand new PhD Gizem Gumuskaya 🎉, collaborator Simon Garnier 🐘 @[email protected], & undergrad students P. Srivastava, B. Cooper, H. Lesser, B. Semegran:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ad…

What I personally think it means: thoughtforms.life/meet-the-anthr…

Mathematician Doug Ravenel’s seven conjectures in topology had all proven to be true, save one. That conjecture was found to be false earlier this year, and upends much of what mathematicians thought about the relationship between shapes and dimensions.
quantamagazine.org/an-old-conject…

Brilliant conversation with Lancelot Da Costa about active inference, multi agent learning, core knowledge, structure learning and intelligence. youtube.com/watch?v=qxEfcr…

Conversation with Dr. Jeff Beck from @versesai on #activeinference the Bayesian Brain, emergence and optimisation. youtube.com/watch?v=c4praC…

One of the biggest problems with LLM is that, after a while, they loose the thread

Self-organizing systems (like human society and muluticellular organisnms) don't have this problem. They can scale in size as much as they want.

Is it possible to make a self-organizing LLM? 🧵

New preprint: francesco215.github.io/Language_CA/, Francesco Sacco & Dalton A R Sakthivadivel, in 3 versions: for biologists, AI folks, & physicists. x.com/francescosacco… Self-organizing systems' topology & linguistic space navigation by LLM: what limits scaling, keeping a longer narrative going?

I've nothing to contribute intellectually but I must confess that the current furore over consciousness theories brings to mind an image of a field full of people on various-sized stepladders all arguing loudly about who's closest to the moon

... 'I will reach a conclusion already known via methods already understood' is a trap, distinctively not what PhD advisors want but something for which you may have been rewarded before. Watch out!

Professor C R Rao, formidable mathematician and statistician, is no more. He was 103. in his birth centenary year, 2020, we carried a biographical article on Prof. Rao, prefaced by a message from him:

bhavana.org.in/c-r-rao-a-life…

New paper: Joel Grodstein and Patrick McMillen

frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…

'Closing the loop on morphogenesis: a mathematical model of morphogenesis by closed-loop reaction-diffusion'

I love this short reminiscence of Grothendieck by Barry Mazur:

people.math.harvard.edu/~mazur/papers/…

'You could meet him on the way
from market, during the weekly market-day in Bures, carrying only one (ample) bag of grapes,
eating them as he walked and offering them to you.'

Enter thermodynamic computing. In this preprint, Thermodynamic Linear Algebra (arxiv.org/abs/2308.05660), we show that a system of coupled oscillators in contact with a heat reservoir can be used to solve linear systems in an amount of time proportional to the number of variables.

i want to project this paragraph onto the surface of the moon

Final version of 'Future medicine: from molecular pathways to the collective intelligence of the body' with the awesome Eric Lagasse (mirm-pitt.net/staff/eric-lag…) is out! This link should give free downloads for a while: authors.elsevier.com/a/1hS2M5Eb1BZj…
+ issue cover, courtesy of Midjourney:

The first chunk of a very long interview by The Well is out and I've been asked to post the link:
youtube.com/watch?v=0a3xg4…