Martin Schrimpf is building a digital twin of the human brain using AI.
His approach: test people on language and vision tasks, compare their behavior and brain data to AI models, then tweak the AIs to act more humanlike.
To scale this, Schrimpf launched Brain-Score, an open-source platform with nearly 100 neural and behavioral data sets. Since 2017, thousands of AI models have been tested against it. 
Schrimpf started out planning a tech career but shifted gears after co-founding startups. He realized AI could help explain the brain — not just mimic tasks.
He earned a doctorate in brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. In 2023, he moved back to Europe to launch the NeuroAI Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne.
Schrimpf explained his switch in focus:
“I thought I could ask neuroscientists how the brain works, and that would help me build better AI,” he said. “But I realized there’s a huge opportunity in the opposite direction: prototyping ideas in silico [on a computer] and using AI models to explain the brain.”
