Get Tony Zador on Dwarkesh Podcast

Tony Zador is at the center of the biggest brain-mapping breakthrough of the past year, as a core member of the International Brain Laboratory and coauthor on the September 3, 2025 Nature paper that charted how prior expectations are represented across 600,000 recorded neurons in the mouse brain. That work, covered widely and highlighted by his lab, reframes decision making as a brain-wide computation and has immediate implications for how we build next-gen AI systems that reason under uncertainty.

He is also helping stand up the pipeline that will turn those insights into talent, co-directing Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s new BioAI Ph.D. program launched on December 4, 2025 to train researchers fluent in both neuroscience and machine learning. Add his group’s recent upgrades to BARseq, which can now map millions of neurons, and you have a guest who can connect fresh experimental results to concrete AI progress today.

There is no record of Zador previously appearing on the Dwarkesh Podcast, which makes this a timely first conversation for an audience obsessed with how biology can supercharge AI. Support this nomination now so listeners can hear the scientist shaping how brains and machines learn, while the field is moving fast.