  The sciences of biological and artificial intelligence are ever more
intertwined. Neural computational principles inspire new intelligent machines,
which are in turn used to advance theoretical understanding of the brain. To
promote further exchange of ideas and collaboration between biological and
artificial intelligence researchers, we introduce the 2023 installment of the
Algonauts Project challenge: How the Human Brain Makes Sense of Natural Scenes
(http://algonauts.csail.mit.edu). This installment prompts the fields of
artificial and biological intelligence to come together towards building
computational models of the visual brain using the largest and richest dataset
of fMRI responses to visual scenes, the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD). NSD
provides high-quality fMRI responses to ~73,000 different naturalistic colored
scenes, making it the ideal candidate for data-driven model building approaches
promoted by the 2023 challenge. The challenge is open to all and makes results
directly comparable and transparent through a public leaderboard automatically
updated after each submission, thus allowing for rapid model development. We
believe that the 2023 installment will spark symbiotic collaborations between
biological and artificial intelligence scientists, leading to a deeper
understanding of the brain through cutting-edge computational models and to
novel ways of engineering artificial intelligent agents through inductive
biases from biological systems.
