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...

> What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs.

Basically we need Multimodal LLM's (terrible naming as it's not an LLM then but still).

I don't know what we need. Nor does anybody else, yet. But we know what it has to do. Basically what a small mammal or a corvid does.

There's been progress. Look at this 2020 work on neural net controlled drone acrobatics.[1] That's going in the right direction.

[1] https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/RSS20_Kaufmann.pdf

You could say language is just the "communication module" but there has got to be another whole underlying interface where non-verbal thoughts are modulated/demodulated to conform to the language expected to be used when communication may or may not be on the agenda.