Hello, my name is Sam Fatehmanesh Vegas and I want humanity to conquer the light cone. I am a Physics major at Caltech in the Thomson Lab. While my interests range from wormholes to quantum computing, my current focus is on understanding the physics of intelligence and scaling human cognition. Feel free to read my thoughts or to check out my projects.
Projects
Generative Brain Model for Zebrafish
For the first time we have access to immense amounts of calcium imaging data for an entire brain. Utilizing this data we can pretrain foundation models similarly to how one trains LLMs on large amounts of text. The resulting large brain models are special since they act as low fidelity emulations, almost if not true uploads, of real zebrafish brains.
Optical Neural Interface (ONI) enabling Random Access Neurons
Calcium imaging serves as the gold standard for large scale high resolution measurement of neural activity. However, optically writing to neurons has hit a bottleneck. Thus, I am currently working on a novel technique to achieve high bandwidth and fully optical random access (read and write) for neurons.
Human Super Intelligence (HSI)
Publications
From SGD to Spectra: A Theory of Neural Network Weight Dynamics
ICML 2025 - International Conference on Machine Learning
View PaperPILLARS: Plume-Deployed Inflatable for Launch and Landing Abrasive Regolith Shielding
AIAA Conference 2025
View Paper