Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299

I'm going to jump into three fun breaking stories this week, two on science and one on AI.

And Richard, they relate back to your work and your book.

Our first story was published in MIT Tech Review today.

It tells the story of researchers at Israel's Weissman Institute who built a system called Brain IT.

The system reconstructs the image a person is looking at while inside a functional MRI machine.

I just put up the slide here.

So take a look at this image.

It's pretty extraordinary.

On one side is the image that a person is looking at inside the fMRI machine.

On the other is the AI reconstruction.

So earlier, brain image decoders could tell you were looking at a dog or a clock tower.

but it lost the color, the composition, and the details.

Brain IT learns structure and meaning separately, and then puts the picture back together.

And here's the clever part.

They also can run the model in reverse, an encoder that predicts how a brain will respond to an image.

So they can feed images no human has ever seen into the scanner, generate predicted brain scans, and then train on those.

The model effectively builds its own data set.

So, Richard, you know, you say in your book that AI is superhuman in any domain you can simulate or verify and nowhere else.

So is a brain simulatable? Is the brain a simulatable domain or is this something different?

It's not yet, but this is still an incredible result.

I still remember the first such result came out when I was still a PhD student.

I went over to the bioinformatics department at Stanford and it was like very grainy little images we could just like extract from this.

And to see this fidelity now and this realism is just incredible.

I think one of the problems, I don't know if this study, I haven't seen it today yet, I've been at work, but like one of the problems is often that you have to look train for each brain because they're all slightly different.

And so you won't be able to just take someone who's never put into an fMRI scanner to see and update the model for that particular person, which would be otherwise amazing for people who are like in a coma and you want to see, are they still thinking stuff? You know, like that would be incredible.