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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. yarg ◴[] No.41892738[source]
> What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs.

Perhaps, but the relative success of trained LLMs acting with apparent generalised understanding may indicate that it is simply the interface that is really an LLM post training;

That the deeper into the network you go (the further from the linguistic context), the less things become about words and linguist structure specifically and the more it becomes about things and relations in general.

(This also means that multiple interfaces can be integrated, sometimes making translation possible, e.g.: image <=> tree<string>)