Middle aged dad, awful musician, lifelong cyclist, #ReadingFC. Chief Digital, Data and Technology Officer at @ukhomeoffice/@HODigital. Views are my own.
England, United Kingdom
Joined March 2011
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Rob Thompson retweeted
The paper argues that today’s neural networks, even the largest language models, are built in the wrong way to ever become real general intelligence.
It explains from scratch what artificial and intelligence and artificial general intelligence mean, and shows that most current definitions just rate outward behaviour instead of internal structure.
Neural networks are described as static pattern machines, trained once by an outside algorithm to fit input output pairs, then frozen as giant tables of numbers.
Because the learning process lives outside the model, the system cannot decide what to care about, cannot rewrite its own circuitry, and cannot build richer representations over time.
It also argues that popular math stories like scaling laws and universal approximation theorems only say that functions can be fitted, not that deep flexible reasoning will appear.
As an alternative sketch, the author suggests separating raw hardware from higher level organization, designing more structured neuron types and learning rules, so that systems can change both behaviour and wiring from within.
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Paper – arxiv. org/abs/2511.18517
Paper Title: "Foundations of AI Frameworks: Notion and Limits of AGI"
Rob Thompson retweeted
A 2-billion-year-old rock just revived an old alien theory.
Fresh findings from NASA and Japan’s space agency reveal that asteroid Bennu—a carbon-rich relic from the solar system’s infancy—contains key ingredients of life: 14 of the 20 amino acids used by Earth’s organisms, plus chemical precursors to DNA and RNA.
Confirmed in January 2025 by the OSIRIS-REx mission, these molecules were locked inside pristine rock untouched since before Earth itself existed. They bolster panspermia, the idea that life’s raw materials arrived from space rather than emerging here.
Picture Earth cooling from its fiery birth. Comets and asteroids, loaded with stable organic compounds, slammed into the young planet, delivering the chemical seeds of biology. Panspermia needs no live passengers—just durable molecules that can spark complexity on a hospitable world.
In short: life may not have begun on Earth; it may have been assembled here from cosmic imports.
For years, skeptics questioned whether fragile organics could survive the void, atmospheric incineration, or explosive impact. Yet lab tests and missions like OSIRIS-REx now show many can. If Bennu carries life’s toolkit, the universe may be seeded with it everywhere.
Rob Thompson retweeted
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Rob Thompson retweeted
Tadej Pogačar, Tour de France stage 19:
81st career win.
15th Tour de France stage win.
24th Grand Tour stage win.
10th Grand Tour stage win THIS season.
25 years old.
Insane.
#TDF2024
Rob Thompson retweeted
Klangphonics is a three-piece techno band from Regensburg, Germany, incorporating the sound of a sewing machine
Rob Thompson retweeted
#Voyager1's interstellar comeback is like music to our ears! For the first time since Nov. 2023 @NASA's most distant spacecraft is returning data from all four of its science instruments again — all from beyond the heliosphere out in interstellar space: go.nasa.gov/3VmvlyA
ALT An artist's concept of the Voyager spacecraft in space. Voyager has a large white satellite dish and several instruments on it. Space, behind the spacecraft, is blue, red, and purple, with stars and galaxies dotting it. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Rob Thompson retweeted
NASA has released a mind-bending animation that lets you experience falling into a black hole
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This video shows how a flight around a black hole would look like, not falling into a black hole.
youtu.be/dGEIsnBRWGs