Apr 19, 2026, q-bio.NCJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Anthony Zador, Jean-Marc Fellous, Terrence Sejnowski, Gina Adam+27
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA. · Institute for Neural Computation, UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA. · Mathematics Department, Kalaheo High School, Kailua, HI, USA.+23
Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have made impressive progress in recent years but remain only loosely interconnected. Based on a workshop convened by the National Science Foundation in August 2025, we identify three fundamental capability gaps in current AI: the inability to interact with the physical world, inadequate learning that produces brittle systems, and unsustainable energy and data inefficiency. We describe the neuroscience principles that address each: co-design of body and controller, prediction through interaction, multi-scale learning with neuromodulatory control, hierarchical distributed architectures, and sparse event-driven computation. We present a research roadmap organized around these principles at near, mid, and long-term horizons. We argue that realizing this program requires a new generation of researchers trained across the boundary between neuroscience and engineering, and describe the institutional conditions: interdisciplinary training, hardware access, community standards, and ethics, needed to support them. We conclude that NeuroAI, neuroscience-informed artificial intelligence, has the potential to overcome limitations of current AI while deepening our understanding of biological neural computation.