The AI Technology Page:

Google Reveals Brain Breakthrough:

Researchers on the Google Connectomics team have mapped the biggest and most detailed AI-assisted reconstruction of human brain tissue to date, which captures each brain cell and neural network connection in intricate detail, with plans to reconstruct a whole mouse brain next.

🔑 Key Points:

Over 10 years, Google researchers worked alongside Harvard researchers, using microscopy methods and machine-learning models to build a 3D map from a small piece of brain tissue.

The fragment of brain tissue was taken from a 45-year-old woman suffering from epilepsy, and the 3D map revealed un-seen knot-like structures that researchers think could be connected to epilepsy.

Now, the team is mapping the whole brain of a mouse—which will be 500 times the size of this human brain map—to unravel the mysteries of neural connections, starting with a key region for learning and memory.

🤔 Why you should care: 

This and Google’s future mouse brain project push the boundaries of current technology and bring us closer to gaining valuable insights into the human brain, helping us better understand brain function and disease.

Google’s AI prophet fast tracks singularity prediction: Ready for doomsday?: “AI will probably be smarter than any single human next year,” the centibillionaire wrote in a post to X, formerly Twitter, in response to Dr Kurzeil’s comments. “By 2029, AI is probably smarter than all humans combined.”

Mind-Reading AI Recreates What You’re Looking At With Amazing Accuracy:

Michael Le Page in New Scientist:

Artificial intelligence systems can now create remarkably accurate reconstructions of what someone is looking at based on recordings of their brain activity. These reconstructed images are greatly improved when the AI learns which parts of the brain to pay attention to. “As far as I know, these are the closest, most accurate reconstructions,” says Umut Güçlü at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Güçlü’s team is one of several around the world using AI systems to work out what animals or people are seeing from brain recordings and scans. In one previous study, his team used a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner to record the brain activity of three people as they were shown a series of photographs.

In another study, the team used implanted electrode arrays to directly record the brain activity of a single macaque monkey as it looked at AI-generated images. This implant was done for other purposes by another team, says Güçlü’s colleague Thirza Dado, also at Radboud University. “The macaque was not implanted so that we can do a reconstruction of perception,” she says. “That is not a good argument to do surgery on animals.” The team has now reanalysed the data from these previous studies using an improved AI system that can learn which parts of the brain it should pay the most attention to.