Tootfinder

A rogue AI enrolls in your online class, then publicly shames you when you remove it. This just happened in a dev forum. Are we ready if it happens to our courses?
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonippolito_a-rogue…

Manifolds and Modules: How Function Develops in a Neural Foundation Model
Johannes Bertram, Luciano Dyballa, T. Anderson Keller, Savik Kinger, Steven W. Zucker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07869 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07869 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.07869
arXiv:2512.07869v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Foundation models have shown remarkable success in fitting biological visual systems; however, their black-box nature inherently limits their utility for under- standing brain function. Here, we peek inside a SOTA foundation model of neural activity (Wang et al., 2025) as a physiologist might, characterizing each 'neuron' based on its temporal response properties to parametric stimuli. We analyze how different stimuli are represented in neural activity space by building decoding man- ifolds, and we analyze how different neurons are represented in stimulus-response space by building neural encoding manifolds. We find that the different processing stages of the model (i.e., the feedforward encoder, recurrent, and readout modules) each exhibit qualitatively different representational structures in these manifolds. The recurrent module shows a jump in capabilities over the encoder module by 'pushing apart' the representations of different temporal stimulus patterns; while the readout module achieves biological fidelity by using numerous specialized feature maps rather than biologically plausible mechanisms. Overall, we present this work as a study of the inner workings of a prominent neural foundation model, gaining insights into the biological relevance of its internals through the novel analysis of its neurons' joint temporal response patterns.
toXiv_bot_toot

We've updated the What Uses More app to reflect last week's finding by Luccioni and Gamazaychikov that "reasoning" mode increases energy and water usage by 30x. The study casts doubt on the improved efficiency AI companies are claiming for newer models
https://www.

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Jonathan Jeremiah:
🎵 Kolkata Bear
#NowPlaying #JonathanJeremiah
https://open.spotify.com/track/6GVyNJOivLDoFeQ6hhttwb

Where are AI’s scientific breakthroughs? It’s been three years since ChatGPT’s release, and still no headlines about AI discovering new particles or curing diseases. When AI does help science, it's not the kind Sam Altman and co. are shilling. https://www.

Another Maine town just defeated a data center in its backyard. In this Women Talking 'Bout AI podcast, Joline Blais explains how her community rallied to the cause, and why AI is only a small part of the reason these are being built https://www.

I've been worried AI will crowd out human voices, and now an AI copy has replaced my 2006 Connected Knowledge site, warping context and displacing the original work online. Can we stop this creeping ensloppification?
https://www.linkedin.…