In an essay for The New Yorker, SFI External Professor Dan Rockmore reflects on how generative AI is becoming a creative partner in research — not just answering prompts, but offering them — while placing it in the long tradition of tools, from writing to the printing press, that.

Reserve your free tickets to SFI’s 30th Ulam Lecture Series with Nobel Laureate Venki Ramakrishnan, August 25 and 26, 7:30pm at @TheLensic. One night on decoding life’s machinery — the ribosome — and one on the science of aging. Join us in person or watch online on SFI's

Collaborate with researchers from around the world. Chart your own transdisciplinary path. Applications for the 2026 Santa Fe Institute Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships are open!. With competitive salary, collaborative and discretionary funds, a generous benefits package

In this SFI seminar, freelance journalist and 2025 SFI Journalism Fellow George Musser explores how puzzles in fundamental physics often hinge on the nature of the observer. Drawing from his 2023 book “Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation,” Musser frames these puzzles through

The Summer 2025 issue of Parallax is here! Explore the latest research, ideas, and voices from the Santa Fe Institute community in our quarterly newsletter. Read the new issue online now.

Direct your own research. Forge lifelong transdisciplinary connections. Apply for the 2026 Santa Fe Institute Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. SFI is looking for recent PhD graduates with strong quantitative and computational skills interested in theoretical collaborative

Metascience — the study of how science works — is gaining urgency, and will be essential for navigating an uncertain future. In his latest Undark column, SFI Resident Professor Brandon Ogbunu explores how metascience offers critical insights into the structures, incentives, and

In this SFI seminar, @QuantaMagazine senior video producer and 2025 SFI Journalism Fellow Emily Buder shows how animation and cinematic storytelling can translate complex ideas — like quantum gravity — into layered, resonant narratives without losing intellectual depth.

SFI President David Krakauer discusses the distinction between knowledge and intelligence in the age of AI, the concept of “exbodiment,” and what true emergence might mean for large language models. Watch the full interview with Machine Learning Street Talk:

The Santa Fe Institute is now accepting applications for the 2026 Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships!. Complexity fellows contribute to SFI’s research and collaborate with leading researchers worldwide. If you recently completed your PhD in any scientific discipline and are

In this seminar, SFI External Professor Dmitri Tymoczko (Princeton University) explores universal mathematical structures underlying music’s fundamental elements: pulse, pitch, and transformed repetition. As well as its implications for how we understand music and broader

This spring, SFI’s Board of Trustees elected Ian McKinnon and Sam Peters as Chair and Vice-Chair. Long-time SFI supporters with New Mexico roots, they bring decades of insight, generosity, and leadership to their new roles, alongside a renewed term for SFI President David

Catch up on our most recent Community Lecture: "Whom Do We Trust? How AI Is (Re)Shaping Our Interactions Today" with @gilliantett. This was the third of six community lectures for 2025, and all are available to watch on SFI’s YouTube channel. Watch here:

Tomorrow: the 3rd event in SFI’s 2025 Community Lecture Series!. Join us at the Lensic Performing Arts Center for Gillian Tett’s lecture, “Whom Do We Trust? How AI Is (Re)Shaping Our Interactions Today” — 7:30pm. Free tickets: or watch the live stream on

An SFI workshop supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation explored whether the field of history — long focused on the particularity of human experience — can incorporate lessons learned from complexity science and evolutionary biology, without losing sight of human freedom

What can ancient houses tell us about inequality? . A recent PNAS special feature, co-edited by Tim Kohler & Amy Bogaard, with contributions from Scott Ortman, uses data from 53,000 homes to trace how wealth disparities emerged, shifted, and narrowed over 10,000 years.

Reserve your free tickets for SFI’s Community Lecture with Gillian Tett: “Whom Do We Trust? How AI Is (Re)Shaping Our Interactions Today”. July 22, 7:30pm at @TheLensic. How is AI changing trust in society? Join us in person or watch online on SFI's YouTube. Tickets:

How do we measure success, impact, and safety in #generativeAI models that engage with the world? Frontier labs in #AI searched for answers to this question at a studio co-organized by @GoogleDeepMind researchers and the SFI Office of Applied Complexity. Read more:

In this SFI seminar, Daniel Messenger (Los Alamos National Lab) discusses how weak-form inference methods can be used to derive effective macroscale descriptions from microscale observations, like mean-field and coarse-grained models. This approach, including the WSINDy.

Artist Tristan Duke brings art and science together in his Glacial Optics project, documenting the Sierra Nevada’s rapidly melting glaciers with a camera lens made from ice, retracing John Muir’s earliest glacial surveys, and even developing giant photographs using Pinyon pine