Lossfunk

A lab for time travellers.

We host and partner with deeply curious people shaping the future of their fields. Based in Bangalore, 🇮🇳 India.

At Lossfunk, we’re curious generalists, so we’re interested in pretty much all the big questions. However, we often find ourselves orbiting around the following themes:

• Minds and intelligence: What are the principles behind learning, memory, adaptation, generalization, agency and creativity? What would genuinely new AI architectures look like? Can individual agents become more capable through collectives, swarms or developmental processes?
• Life and consciousness: How did life, language, cognition and subjective experience arise? How can consciousness become an empirical science? Which biological or artificial systems can experience or suffer? Could life and intelligence exist on non-carbon substrates?
• Reality and knowledge: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does mathematics describe the universe so well? What explains fine-tuning, time and quantum phenomena? What are the limits of measurement, models and human understanding?
• Science and discovery: What makes a research question important? Can AI develop scientific taste, form theories and design decisive experiments? How should future labs, research institutions and tools for discovery work?
• Civilization and coordination: How can we create abundance without concentrating power or making humans obsolete? What might better democracies, coordination systems and post-work institutions look like? How can India build stronger scientific, technological and industrial capacity?
• Human flourishing: How can people reclaim agency, change behavior, improve mental health and extend healthy life? What roles might neurotechnology, BCI and cognitive enhancement play? How should we think about suffering and moral concern across humans, animals and possible artificial minds?
• Enabling technologies: Compute, chips and fabs; energy and fusion; synthetic biology; AI, bio and cyber resilience; and the physical infrastructure required for scientific and civilizational progress.
• Progress and change: Why do some technologies, products, organizations and institutions spread while better alternatives stall? How do incentives, markets, interfaces and human behavior determine what actually changes?

You can see our request for curiosity (frequently refreshed) for more concrete examples.

Join Lossfunk

• Sabbatical (for exceptional, experienced people): a 3-6 month fully funded sabbatical to work uninterruptedly on a risky yet important project
  • We host people and their projects that wouldn’t typically be supported by traditional institutions (academia, industry, VCs)
  • Typically meant for people who've had an impressive career but now seek a break to explore a burning question
  • Bangalore based + financial support included
• Fellowship (for early-career strongly-autonomous people): a 6 month paid fellowship based out of Bangalore to research, create and explore
  • We host young people who want to attack an ambitious, open problem and can work independently
  • Typically meant for early-career researchers and builders who already possess some work experience
  • Bangalore based + financial support included
• Residency (for builders, creators and founders): a 6-week cohort in Bangalore with 10-15 peers building the future
  • For people working in AI, science, deep tech and related fields
  • Bangalore based, part-time OK; program runs alongside main job / startup
  • We take no equity or fees

Latest Releases

• AI for science • Eliciting Research Taste in LLMs through Future Research Direction Choice [COLM LM4Sci Workshop, 2026]
• Representations • Denoising Models Develop Human-Like Perceptual Illusion Representations Across Architectures [Preprint]
• Representations • Geometry of Human Perceptual Domains Emerges Transiently in LLM Representations [⭐ ICML Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop, 2026]
• LLMs • Frontier Coding Agents Use Metaprogramming to Adapt to Unfamiliar Programming Languages [Preprint]
• World Models • Hybrid Neural World Models [Preprint]
• Philosophy • Metaphysical Concepts in AI Should Be Judged by Consequences [⭐ ICML 2026 - main]
• RL • Discovering Reinforcement Learning Interfaces with Large Language Models [⭐ Reinforcement Learning Conference (RLC) 2026 - main]
• Consciousness • AI Consciousness Requires Validated Models of Human Consciousness [AAAI 2026 Symposium on Machine Consciousness]
• LLMs • EsoLang-Bench: Evaluating Genuine Reasoning in Large Language Models via Esoteric Programming Languages [Logical Reasoning and ICBINB workshops at ICLR, 2026]
• AI for science • Why LLMs Aren't Scientists Yet: Lessons from Four Autonomous Research Attempts [Report]
• LLMs • Think Just Enough: Sequence-Level Entropy as a Confidence Signal for LLM Reasoning [Foundations of Reasoning Models Workshop at NeurIPS, 2025]
• LLMs • IPO: Your Language Model is Secretly a Preference Classifier [⭐ ACL 2025 - main]

Check out all our releases (papers, reports, code).

Attend Lossfunk Events

• Deeply technical talks by researchers, thinkers and experts (see past talks on youtube)
• Salons & Mixers to curate and bring together people who should know each other (see previous salons)
• Curated events with other orgs and people shaping the future of a field (e.g. conference for ai scientists)

Have an idea for a talk or an event? Pitch us: info@lossfunk.com

Want to attend an upcoming event (physical or online)? Join our WhatsApp announcement group (below), or follow us on luma.com/lossfunk.

🔔 To get notified about our upcoming events or releases, join our Whatsapp community (we post ~1x/week)

Sponsors

We’re a lab focused on benefitting the public at large by curating curious people and supporting their projects. To help with our mission, in the past or at present, we’re supported by following organizations.

AWS, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Modal, E2E / Jarvis and Sarvam <- thanks for helping Lossfunk!

We mention our sponsors in our releases, social media and events and they get recognized by deeply curious people.

In case you’d like to sponsor or partner, shoot us an email: info@lossfunk.com

Links

• Contact: info@lossfunk.com
• Blog: letters.lossfunk.com
• Github: github.com/lossfunk
• X: @lossfunk

About

Hi! I'm Paras, founder of Lossfunk where I'm constantly chasing the gradient of my curiosity. I read, write, research and build.

Previously, I founded Wingify, scaled it and then exited to a private equity group.

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Stay curious :)

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