Backpropagation dominates deep learning, yet it uses a mechanism the brain likely cannot. Specifically, the backward pass needs exact transposes of forward weight matrices. This is the weight transport problem. Sakana AI’s new paper, Diffusing Blame, confronts this constraint directly. The research team trains networks that obey Dale’s principle while avoiding weight transport entirely. What…

Volunteering at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 isn’t just about scoring free admission (though a free three-day pass is a pretty sweet perk). It’s your chance to get a behind-the-scenes look at how one of the world’s biggest startup conferences gets built — and to connect with the people shaping the future of tech while you’re doing…

JetBrains Research Open-Sources KotlinLLM. KotlinLLM is an IntelliJ IDEA plugin for Kotlin/JVM projects that adds a language feature called Smart macros. A Smart macro is a regular Kotlin function call whose body is generated Kotlin code. The public API is deliberately small. asLlm(from, hint) converts an input of type F into a typed value T,…