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Animats ◴[] No.41890003[source]
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...

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1. agentcoops ◴[] No.41892576[source]
For those interested in the history, this is in fact the Neural Network research path that predated LLMs. Not just in the sense that Hinton et al and the core of the "Parallel Distributed Processing"/Connectionist school were always opposed to Chomsky's identification of brain-thought-language, but that the original early 2000s NSF grant awarded to Werbos, Ng, LeCun et al was for "Deep Learning in the Mammalian Visual Cortex." In their research program, mouse intelligence was posited as the first major challenge.