Our Aims
We are a group of neuroscientists, engineers, and AI researchers working to reconceptualize neuroscience and to safeguard human agency in an increasingly AI-shaped world. We believe that:
- Basic science and preclinical research should move faster: Automation and open-source tools already available today can accelerate breakthroughs blocked by manual workflows and siloed data in traditional academic and industry approaches.
- Neuroscience must focus on natural behaviours and do less harm: Better sensors and smarter analysis allow us to learn more from fewer animals in naturalized habitats.
- Science should be completely open: We're creating the
Neurotech Academy and a
Whole-brain-emulation course of study to onboard a community of like-minded scientists.
- Human agency is precious: Transparent, biologically inspired models can help us study goal formation and alignment in AI systems. Whole-brain emulation (WBE) is an ideal tool for this work. We've written extensively on
functional WBE,
human agency loss,
non-reversal agency loss to AIs,
and ran
AI safety hackathons on agency loss,
Our present work has two intertwined and ambitiuos aims:
- Create the most advanced neuroscience research platforms focusing on naturalistic behaviours.
We build the most naturalized behaviour rodent habitats that can support petabyte-scale multimodal datasets.
At the core of this approach is the replacement of single-task, low-bandwidth behaviour assays with high-resolution, long-term behavioural logging.
We aim to solve the
translation and
replication crises in biology. Overcoming these requires
studying animals in increasingly natural and experimental confound-free worlds.
- Create whole-brain emulation (WBE) technologies while evaluating them as a principled platform for AI safety.
We are working on building the first WBE model of the C57BL/6 mouse strain. Our approach relies on scalable hardware and data generation approaches
and AI acceleration. We seek to analyze and decompose WBEs using neuroscience and AI interpretability tools –
towards a biologically grounded baseline for evaluating alignment proposals. Our work aligns with the NeuroAI-for-Safety
roadmap and current WBE advocacy efforts.
Looking Ahead
We aim to build a functioning mouse WBE capable of novel task learning while emulating mammalian brain dynamics and
being amenable to causal-perturbation paradigms. This first model will lay the foundation for a revolution in animal researh
- and eventually human WBE. We view achieving of human WBE as a crucial component of AI alignment and human fluorishing strategies.
Join Us
- If your work is in behavioural or computational neuroscience, systems engineering, ASIC design or ethics — we want to hear from you.
- We welcome collaborators committed to rigour, open science, and long-term thinking.
- We're actively seeking contributors to our Ethics Board: If you've spoken publicly about AI safety,
machine consciousness or human agency — please reach out.
- Contact: info@netholabs.com
Our Mission