Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

This is an important result.

The actual paper [1] says that functional MRI (which is measuring which parts of the brain are active by sensing blood flow) indicates that different brain hardware is used for non-language and language functions. This has been suspected for years, but now there's an experimental result.

What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs. It's not clear what that something else is. But, as the paper mentions, the low-end mammals and the corvids lack language but have some substantial problem-solving capability. That's seen down at squirrel and crow size, where the brains are tiny. So if someone figures out to do this, it will probably take less hardware than an LLM.

This is the next big piece we need for AI. No idea how to do this, but it's the right question to work on.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07522-w.epdf?shar...

Brain size isn't necessarily a very good correlate of intelligence. For example dolphins and elephants have bigger brains than humans, and sperm whales have much bigger brains (5x by volume). Neanderthals also had bigger brains than modern humans, but are not thought to have been more intelligent.

A crow has a small brain, but also has very small neurons, so ends up having 1.5B neurons, similar to a dog or some monkeys.

Not sure neuron number correlates to smarts, either.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/

There are 100 million in my gut, but it doesn't solve any problems that aren't about poop, as far as I know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

If the suspiciously round number is accurate, this puts the human gut somewhere between a golden hamster and ansell's mole-rat, and about level with a short-palated fruit bat.

Agreed. It's architecture that matters, although for a given brain architecture (e.g. species) there might be benefits to scale. mega-brain vs pea-brain.

I was just pointing out that a crow's brain is built on a more advanced process node than our own. Smaller transistors.