As promised yesterday — I reviewed and wrote up my thoughts on the research paper that Meta released yesterday:

Full review: Paper Review: TRImodal Brain Encoder for whole-brain fMRI response prediction (TRIBE)

I recommend checking out my review! I discuss some takeaways and there are interesting visuals from the paper and related papers.

However in quick take form, the TL;DR is:

Summary

• Meta's Brain & AI Research team won first place at Algonauts 2025 with TRIBE, a deep neural network trained to predict brain responses to stimuli across multiple modalities (text, audio, video), cortical areas (superior temporal lobe, ventral, and dorsal visual cortices), and individuals (four people).
• The model is the first brain encoding pipeline which is simultaneously non-linear, multi-subject, and multi-modal.
• The team show that these features improve model performance (exemplified by their win!) and provide extra insights, including improved neuroanatomical understandings.
• Specifically, the model predicts blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals (a proxy for neural activity) in the brains of human participants exposed to video content: Friends, The Bourne Supremacy, Hidden Figures, The Wolf of Wall Street and Life (a BBC Nature documentary).

From The Rundown today: "Meta’s FAIR team just introduced TRIBE, a 1B parameter neural network that predicts how human brains respond to movies by analyzing video, audio, and text — achieving first place in the Algonauts 2025 brain modeling competition."

This ties extremely well to my post published a few days ago: Third-order cognition as a model of superintelligence (ironically: Meta® metacognition).

I'll read the Meta AI paper and write up a (shorter) post on key takeaways.

Just published "Meta® Meta Cognition: Intelligence Progression as a Three-Tier Hybrid Mind"

TL;DR: We know that humans and some animals have two tiers of cognition — an integrative metacognition layer, and a lower non-metarepresentational cognition layer. With artificial superintelligence, we should define a third layer and model it as a three-tier hybrid mind. I define the concepts precisely and talk about their implications for alignment.

I also talk about chimp-human composites which is fun.

Really interested in feedback and discussion with the community!