About
I was born in Moscow and moved to the United States when I was ten. I am a neuroscientist by training and now work on artificial intelligence, mostly on the question of how the internal states of large neural networks give rise to what they do.
I studied at Boston University and spent two years as a technician in Tim Gardner's lab, building carbon-fiber electrode arrays for recording from single neurons in singing zebra finches over months. I received my PhD in Neuroscience from Harvard in 2020, working with David Cox on how three-dimensional head movement shapes activity in the visual cortex of freely moving rats, and did postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School with Sandeep Robert Datta.
Since 2022 I have been at Flagship Pioneering, where I am a Senior Principal Scientist on the Pioneering Intelligence team. My research there applies ideas from systems neuroscience, dynamical systems and population geometry in particular, to the internals of transformers and biological foundation models. I am also a co-founder of a Flagship company, still in stealth, focused on AI and mental health. With Jesseba Fernando I write Of Two Minds, a newsletter about natural and artificial brains.
My essays and reporting have appeared in Noema, Nautilus, and Undark, on animal research, the epistemics of neuroscience, psychedelics, open-access publishing, and the history of Soviet science.
Guitchounts is pronounced gee-chunz: gee like geese, chunz like you just sneezed.
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