groups, geometry, & hierarchy in neural representations | founder @newtheoryai, @MissionRobotBay, @neur_reps, phd @ucberkeley @redwood_neuro @geometric_intel
San Francisco, CA
Joined January 2017
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🎉Our NeurReps 2023 Call for Papers just dropped! 🎉
Come share your work with the community at NeurIPS this year!
If you're curious about math, minds, and machines and interested in getting involved, let's chat! 🧠
Announcing 📣
💥 The NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Symmetry and Geometry in Neural Representations💥
neurreps.org
We’re ramping up for our second NeurIPS workshop this year — spanning GDL, applied geometry, and neuroscience!
See our call for papers below 👇
Christian Shewmake retweeted
🧠 The Science of Intelligence 🧠
Check out the recordings/zooms of this new course at @Redwood_Neuro redwood.berkeley.edu/courses…
Very excited to see how Jake, Mike, Bruno and others are transforming the Redwood into the new center for studying and designing a theory of intelligence ⭐️
Christian Shewmake retweeted
Here it is - the official, revised, peer-reviewed version of my Platonic Space paper. mdpi.com/2409-9287/11/5/161 Of all the many unpopular positions I’ve taken over the decades - bitter controversies around the origin of left-right asymmetry in embryogenesis, bioelectricity and genetics, diverse intelligence, etc., this one has by far generated the most pushback: serious (grateful for those!) and energetic attempts to move me to other views, pleas to just drop it and not talk about it (for several different reasons), nasty emails and accusations, impacts on reviews of papers that have nothing to do with this, etc. Kind of amazing to me how incendiary this is. What can I say... Our job is to call it as we see it, and right now for me, this is it. Apologies to collaborators and colleagues for any shrapnel! Time will tell if this pans out or not; I've placed my bets. And btw, if you think this stuff is weird and uncomfortable, just wait… There’s much more on the way. The knob turns slowly but as long as the data keep coming, I'm going to say what I think it all means and follow it to the next steps it enables. Buckle up!
Christian Shewmake retweeted
Our next CIMC.AI hackathon is to create "Lattice Animals" - grid cells that cooperate to maintain a unique shape. Join us!
luma.com/vu8w1g9l
RT @doristsao: We have 15 open positions at Astera Neuro! We're hiring experimental and computational neuroscientists and engineers to buil…
Christian Shewmake retweeted
How seriously should we take the possibility of one of the neolabs making some wild algorithmic breakthrough that puts it ahead of OpenAI and Anthropic?
Christian Shewmake retweeted
The way to win at capitalism is to focus on what it actually does (make customers' lives better) rather than the socialist caricature of it (squeeze every penny out of them). The latter gets you 2x returns at best, whereas making new things for people can get you 10x.
Christian Shewmake retweeted
Au contraire: I think it's obvious to many of us that the transformer architecture, as incredible as it is, is not how the brain handles long or even medium length context. A transformer can tell you what was input token #243 instantly, a human can't. Discovering the "brain's transformer" is one of the holy grails of NeuroAI. But more broadly, absolutely, LLMs have been incredibly helpful in shaping our imagination about what the solution to intelligence could look like, and most importantly, showing that a simple solution (+ lots of data) is possible.
Christian Shewmake retweeted
Today @MissionRobotBay turns one month old. Our first thirty days brought:
- Over 1,000 physical AI builders in-person in the space
- 9 events including two research clubs, two hackathons, and a very grand opening
- 12 companies became members, from solo to series A
- 27 robots installed, at least 10 not available to the public yet
And during that time:
- one member closed their big new funding round
- another launched a product
- Another launched a showroom for their new line
- another sold their first five units to @newtheoryai
- and New Theory more than halved a key variance metric thanks to that purchase
I’ve gotten to have in depth conversations with founders about:
- Cable materials engineering and why snow plow physics lead to cable breakage
- Why the supply chain of ESP-32s is stubbornly unresponsive to local manufacture
- Sticking brains inside hand manipulators rather than the humanoids they’re attached to
- The hidden language centers of the human brain and how they apply to machine learning
- On-prem gpu clusters, their financing, and how they can mitigate factory latency
- Emerging network tech that would make those clusters unnecessary (or at least, not mandatory)
- The tool stack that lets you build your own semi-legal self driving car right now
Next month already set to being:
- 10 events (and counting)
- Expanded floor space for more robot bays
- Hands-on builders nights
- Many more robots.
Quite a start for robotics’ beating heart
Christian Shewmake retweeted
Wait a minute. Who let all of these unreleased embodiments in here? What do they think this is, some kind of show floor for state of the art robots launching later this year?
Christian Shewmake retweeted
Agree we need a party in the middle: not fringe MAGA and not fringe socialist left. Someone rational please step up. We need a growth economy with with capitalism and fairness and fewer perks for the rich and powerful. Also need economy to help those who can’t help themselves like elderly, handicapped, sick…
Christian Shewmake retweeted
In reflecting on this question, it was striking how seemingly few great papers come to mind. Papers that are simultaneously: (1) thought provoking; (2) beautifully written, constructed, and executed; (3) teach you something deep; (4) advance the field in a clear way.
Christian Shewmake retweeted
CIMC is having a hackathon in San Francisco this saturday on Coopetition: exploring mechanisms where agents in a digital mind both cooperate and compete in maximizing coherence. Join us!
Christian Shewmake retweeted
Big news today. Science's PRIMA visual prosthesis, our retinal implant for macular degeneration, has received its CE mark, which means marketing approval in Europe. This is a huge milestone to begin to have a device like this commercially available to regular patients. 1/
Christian Shewmake retweeted
Congrats to the winners of the Embodied Metal Hackathon 🏆
We're astounded by the response. 70 hackers, 21 robots, 12 teams – and 10 of them shipped working robots by Sunday's live judging. Data collected Saturday, models trained overnight, demos on real hardware.
Read on for the winners 👇
Christian Shewmake retweeted
This weekend I had the opportunity to serve as a judge for the Embodied Metal Hackathon at @MissionRobotBay in San Francisco.
It was exciting to watch dozens of teams spend just one weekend building and deploying new robot capabilities on real hardware.
• Robotics development is becoming dramatically faster. Teams collected data, trained policies, integrated VLMs, and deployed to robots—all within a couple of days.
• The competitive advantage is increasingly the iteration loop rather than model size. The best teams combined fast data collection, rapid evaluation, reliable hardware integration, and continuous testing.
• The gap between foundation models and physical deployment continues to shrink. Building embodied AI is becoming much more accessible as datasets, open-source models, inference infrastructure, and developer tooling mature.
Huge thanks to @Scav (@MissionRobotBay), @thejesonlee (@savant_vc), @Solo__Tech, @newtheoryai, @rerundotio, @NorthstarRobots, @modal, @chasebrignac, @RiyaBaviskar, @ritwikpavan, @cashewmake2, @chrisrilling and all the organizers, mentors, sponsors, and participants for putting together such a high-energy event. It was inspiring to see so many builders pushing embodied AI forward!
Looking forward to seeing many of these weekend prototypes evolve into real robotics startups.
#PhysicalAI #EmbodiedAI #Robotics #AI #Startup #Hackathon
Christian Shewmake retweeted
The first hackathon in history to have a four-hole robot minigolf tournament
Christian Shewmake retweeted
Christian Shewmake retweeted
I can’t say enough good things about John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack and his Keen Technologies. But now Khurram Javed @kjaved_ and I have broken away to start our own startup and pursue a slightly different path toward understanding intelligence. Like Keen (and like Ineffable) we at Oak Lab @oaklab believe in reinforcement learning and that intelligence is created and maintained from run-time experience. But we think current deep learning methods are weak and inefficient, and need not more tweaks, but fundamentally new ideas and a thorough reworking before they can provide a solid foundation for achieving the more ambitious goals of AI.