Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

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...

I’d be extremely surprised if AI recapitulates the same developmental path as humans did; evolution vs. next-token prediction on an existing corpus are completely different objective functions and loss landscapes.

I then looked it up and they had each copy/pasted the same Stack overflow answer.

Furthermore, the answer was extremely wrong, the language I used was superficially similar to the source material, but the programming concepts were entirely different.

What this tells me is there is clearly no “reasoning” happening whatsoever with either model, despite marketing claiming as such.