Richard Csaky | Scaling Next-Brain-Token Prediction
Foresight Institute’s Neurotech Group
Scaling Next-Brain-Token Prediction
Abstract: Modern AI has converged on a surprisingly general principle: learn powerful priors by predicting what comes next. In this talk, I argue that the same scaling-first recipe can be applied to brain recordings to move from task-specific decoders toward brain foundation models, specifically of the causal, generative kind. I’ll present a framework that treats high-bandwidth electrophysiology (with MEG as a motivating case) as a token stream: first, learn an efficient tokenizer that globally compresses spatiotemporal activity into discrete tokens; then, train a causal long-context sequence model with a standard next-token objective. Conditioning is implicit: instead of adding subject and task labels, or bespoke heads, a snippet of real brain activity becomes the “prompt,” and the model learns to continue it, encouraging specificity to session, subject, and context while remaining architecture-agnostic and compatible with frontier multimodal backbones. I’ll close by discussing what “on-manifold” long-horizon neural generation should mean, why evaluation must probe drift and prompt-specificity (not just reconstruction), and how brain tokens could ultimately be interleaved with language, vision, and action tokens as a route to grounding and more efficient reasoning.
Bio: Currently building large-scale foundational brain models as an independent researcher funded by the Foresight Institute. Previously, designed and built muscle-based gesture control applications at Sonera, a neurotech sensor startup. PhD in neuroAI from Oxford, and a long time ago (2017-2019) I was doing research in Transformer-based dialog models. I am interested in pursuing the development and integration of AGI into our lives in a way that fits into the natural human experience - as natural as a sword/hammer feels for physical augmentation. The only way to survive the above-human structures and technologies we are creating is to augment the mind to be able to deal with them.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-csaky/
Website: https://ricsinaruto.github.io/
Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=jDHrvUwAAAAJ
Foresight Institute’s Neurotech Group
A group of neuroscience researchers, entrepreneurs, and allies advancing beneficial short-term and long-term neurotechnology applications.
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