Aatish Bhatia

🧠✨ I have a new project out with my friend (and brilliant neuroscientist) @arkarupbanerjee.bsky.social exploring how collections of neurons create complex behaviors. In the first chapter, we wire together a brain from scratch to guide a creature towards the light. Check it out! aatishb.com/myriad/

For years, @aatishb.com and I have met weekly to talk (neuro)science. One question keeps coming back: what does it actually mean to find "the neural circuit for a behavior"? We've turned those conversations into a series that explains the success stories of neuroscience. Check out the first one👇🏽

Music from Knots

Grateful that there's still enough life in the Internet left that we get something as incredible and delightful as this pudding.cool/2026/10/kevi...

Three years ago, my dad said that all fish are the same shape. Out of spite, I decided to draw all 478 families of bony fish listed in Nelson 2016. There's still some stuff I need to edit and some fish I want to redraw but, after 985 days, I finished my big dumb fish project last night.

If you missed it: I wrote about why it takes such a massive amount of computation to train AI. The numbers are beyond astronomical.

Why do I struggle even reading papers that are clearly AI? Writing is a window into another person’s brain, their thinking, values, and outlook. When I read AI text, I mostly feel they shortchanged themselves and me by not offering that.

Sorry to hear that Jeffrey Goldstone has died. He was a giant of quantum field theory- pioneering our modern understanding of symmetry breaking- and later did great things in quantum information. I knew him at MIT as a gruff but friendly wise man. physics.mit.edu/news/jeffrey...

Stereographic Rubik’s

GPT 6 Astra took nearly an octillion calculations to train. Even calling this figure astronomical understates its size: An octillion is a thousand times the number of stars in the known universe. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

This is a really lovely interview with Steven Strogatz that goes a lot deeper than you might expect m.youtube.com/watch?v=LfGe...

Here's a mind-blowing explanation of the math behind the training of AI models nyti.ms/4jXB4sy by @aatishb.com

Have a new story out in NYT today about the mind-boggling amount of math calculations that it takes to train AI. Here's a paywall free link:

So sad to hear that the iconic, trailblazing, Apollo 11 moon landing software engineering lead, Margaret Hamilton, is no longer with us. Love this image of her, standing next to a print out of the software that landed Buzz Aldrin and Neil Amstrong on the moon! 👩‍🔬🔭🛰️🧪 ℹ️: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Columnist Jordana Cepelewicz envisions a world where, despite AI’s dominion, future mathematicians will still have much to do. It just may look nothing like what they’re doing now. https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-the-end-of-math-as-we-know-it-20261005/

Now on @sciam.bsky.social: OpenAI’s latest math dump has arrived. It consists of hundreds of new results to major problems, from the same internal model that produced a million-dollar math proof last month. It could take mathematicians years to sift through it all.

How rare are neutrino interactions? A neutrino (of the type emitted by the Sun) could go through a light year of lead with only a small chance of interacting. They pass through the Earth, and each of us, constantly, without anyone noticing. 100 trillion neutrinos go through you every second.

Genuinely concerned about what's happening to the space-time continuum in this toilet.

Hope your day was better than Darwin’s, on this day 165 years ago

This is a photograph of the edge of one of Saturn's rings, looking down from above. Those spiky dark shapes are shadows. Shadows of giant towers of ice and dust grains clumped together that rise up to three *kilometres* above the 10-m thick rings.

"If mathematics is genuinely about understanding rather than output, then this principle should appear not merely in declarations about AI but in hiring criteria, the evaluation process and journal practices. It is imperative to start changing the system now." proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/18/t...

"But A.I. is a different kind of technology, because it can deliver an end result before creative thinking has happened at all." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Really interesting article by @aatishb.com on how LLMs work!

As of today, the CDC has changed (reverted) their Covid guidance to make the vaccine recommended for all people over 18. In addition to being a smart public health move, this recommendation also means insurance must cover it. Read more here: www.cdc.gov/covid/hcp/va... Listen to a breakdown here:

NEW blog post about AI’s ‘jagged intelligence’: I trained an AI model from scratch to play a simple children’s puzzle. Unlike a human player, it can solve the hardest puzzles, but it fails to solve the easiest ones. aatishb.com/blog/2026/ai...

The Facial Expressions of Tethys by artist Julius von Bismarck. A suspended high-sea buoy that moves in real time. Sensors on a twin buoy out in the Atlantic Ocean send live satellite data to motors inside the museum. This makes the indoor buoy copy the exact, real-time movements of the ocean waves.

In other news, I started a new blog. Living my best internet life like it's 2015 :)

NEW blog post about AI’s ‘jagged intelligence’: I trained an AI model from scratch to play a simple children’s puzzle. Unlike a human player, it can solve the hardest puzzles, but it fails to solve the easiest ones. aatishb.com/blog/2026/ai...

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #OTD 📊 🎂Sep 22, 1791 Michael Faraday born in Newington Butts, Surrey, England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 1820-1835: Graphical analysis applied to natural phenomena (electric and magnetic lines of force, weather, tides) Made these invisible constructs open to inspection 👓

Happy fall (or spring, depending)!

So chilling - but thanks @elisecutts.bsky.social for the roundup and thoughtful commentary. "If AI scams — and even just lazy AI pitches that flood inboxes — force us to rely on relationship networks to establish trust, science journalism is going to close up." www.reviewertoo.com/2026-09-21-s...

Love this idea, a great way to visualize how far we scroll

A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...

Really clear piece by @melaniemitchell.bsky.social that explains why OpenAI's systems hacked Hugging Face, and how metaphors can mislead us about what really happened aiguide.substack.com/p/misleading...

Everything you need to know about today’s wild “AI solves $1M math problem” news, via @sciam.bsky.social: www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-m...

Fascinating interview with Terry Tao about the value of mathematical thinking m.youtube.com/watch?v=OOMx...

LLMs are going to fundamentally change what scholarship is. Pumping out true propositions used to be a viable career. Now much of that can be offloaded, leaving scholars the tasks of understanding, synthesizing, and deciding what is valuable. Goes for math, philosophy, parts of physics.

Fascinating interview with Terry Tao about the value of mathematical thinking m.youtube.com/watch?v=OOMx...

Thoughtful piece: "Upon reflection, I've come to believe that quality software is not about how many features something has or how quickly it is built but rather how cared for it is by the designers, developers, and product people who work on it."

Reaction Diffusion in Photoshop- Blur, Sharpen, Posterize, repeat

To tell if a maze is solvable, just hang it by its corners If it tears into pieces, you’ve found a solution