Researchers identified a new class of traveling brain waves that rotate over space and time. The study reveals that these vortex-like waves are driven by a unique, circular “merry-go-round” architectural layout of neurons in the sensory cortex.
Operating globally, these spiral waves synchronize activity across hemispheres, between sensory and motor networks, and down into deep subcortical structures—acting as a spatiotemporal clock to coordinate sensation, predict sequences, and guide voluntary physical action. — Read More
Author Archives: Rick's Cafe AI
Speedy, spiraling electrical waves may be key to brain’s information flow
Like a stadium full of sports fans doing the wave, neurons coordinate their electrical signals in rhythmic patterns that sweep across the cortex, the brain’s outermost layer. Recent studies in humans and animals have shown these patterns, called traveling waves, can take on complex shapes, among them a rotating spiral that has been observed during deep sleep, memory retrieval, and other brain processes. A new study has now captured the fast-spinning waves spanning whole brains, offering clues to how they’re organized and what they might do.
The study, published today in Science, examined the brains of mice using multiple recording and imaging methods to reveal brainwide patterns that unite disparate regions from the cortex to the deep brain. The research suggests rotating waves have a key role in coordinating the flow of information across the brain to support perception and behavior. It also offers an explanation for the waves’ spiral pattern by showing that they move along a circular path laid by axons—the long projections of neurons. — Read More
Testing Mythos and Fable
Over the last two weeks, both the U.S. Government and Anthropic took significant actions that demonstrated their power to control access to AI by restricting what others can do with frontier models. This has been one of those moments that, once seen, will be hard to unsee, and it is significantly accelerating many businesses’ and nation states’ efforts to ensure reliable access to AI that no one else can terminate.
Anthropic first released Claude Fable 5, a version of its Mythos model with additional guardrails, including some restrictions that seem well justified on safety grounds (such as limitations on applying it to hacking, bioweapons, and so forth). However, it also restricted developers’ ability to use it to build competing LLM technology. This move was concerning, given that the whole AI community, including Anthropic, has benefitted tremendously from open research — indeed, the AI revolution was kicked off by my former team (Google Brain) freely publishing the Transformers paper!
… This move represents a raw demonstration of power by Anthropic. It has used “safety” arguments to hinder potential competitors. Platforms succeed when they are viewed as stable, reliable partners that one can build on. The sudden rule changes by Anthropic (including a mandatory 30 day data retention policy for Fable usage) have made developers wonder about the stability of building on any one proprietary LLM provider, not just Anthropic. — Read More
Securing the future of AI agents
AI agents are transforming our relationship with technology. By autonomously executing complex tasks — from cyber defence to scientific discovery and product development — these systems are unlocking a new era of productivity. In the U.S alone, AI agents could create $2.9 trillion in economic value by 2030.
As these agents become more capable, they also require more sophisticated safeguards. That’s why we developed our AI Control Roadmap: a framework for building and managing the advanced AI we deploy within Google. This “defense-in-depth” approach, which could serve as a model for the wider industry, goes beyond traditional model alignment, adding a crucial layer of system-level security that provides assurance even if alignment is imperfect. — Read More
Reinforcement learning towards broadly and persistently beneficial models
As AI systems become more capable and autonomous in high-stakes settings like health, science, education, and coding, they will need to remain helpful, honest, transparent, and safe in situations they have not seen before. This requires generalizing to new contexts, new pressures, longer and more complex interactions, and across domains that differ from those seen during training.
We find that reinforcement learning on realistic scenarios targeting beneficial traits can produce broad improvements across dozens of benchmarks measuring aligned and beneficial behavior. These alignment gains generalize beyond the domains used for training and persist under adversarial pressure. — Read More
Anthropic Thinks “FOOM” Is Near
Famous AI Doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky first wrote about “Recursive Self Improvement” (RSI from here on) back in December 2008 on LessWrong. For those who don’t know what this means, it is the hypothetical tipping point where Skynet becomes self-aware and starts self-improving at a geometric rate AI systems are able to meaningfully contribute or even take over their own training and enhancement. In short, one generation of AIs can give rise to their successors.
Dario Amodei, and Anthropic more broadly, have bought this narrative, hook, line, and sinker. — Read More
A New Era of Midjourney
Today we’re gonna announce something a little weird and a little crazy, but also spectacular and filled with hope.
… We’re building a bold new kind of machine to reimagine the foundations of healthcare and our relationships to our bodies.
… It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what’s happening inside your body. — Read More
Agentic Trust Framework (ATF)
he Agentic Trust Framework (ATF) is an open governance specification for autonomous AI agents, applying Zero Trust principles across five core security elements. Published through the Cloud Security Alliance and licensed under CC BY 4.0.
ATF answers the question every organization deploying AI agents must face: How do we maintain control? — Read More
Building AI Agents for AR Glasses and XR Devices with NVIDIA XR AI
Developers building for AR glasses and wearable devices face an infrastructure gap. The hardware is ready, but creating AI experiences requires integrating live camera and microphone streams, multimodal AI models, enterprise data, tool use, deployment infrastructure, and device-specific runtimes.
NVIDIA XR AI is designed to address this challenge by providing a reusable foundation for connecting extended reality (XR) devices to GPU-accelerated AI services running in the cloud, data center, workstation, or edge. — Read More
On Post-Quantum Security Adoption
From Alex’s blog post, I’ve learned that there are enough recent breakthroughs in quantum computing that I should take post-quantum cryptography seriously. Google and Cloudflare both set a target of 2029 for having their systems secure against quantum computers. Similarly, the UK government is targeting 2035.
The issue is that cryptography is built upon math problems that are difficult to solve. Quantum computers make solving some of these problems such as integer factorization and discrete logs easier. If someone has a quantum computer that can sufficiently solve those two problems, then they can likely decrypt many ciphertexts that were produced using asymmetric cryptography techniques (think public/private key-pairs). Wikipedia has a great article discussing post-quantum cryptography if you want to read more.
Given all that, if the cost isn’t too high then it’s not a bad idea to look at our current systems and see what we can make quantum-resistant today. — Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 