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...

You mean besides a few layers of LLMs near input and output that deal with tokens? We have the rest of the layers.

1. Syntax

2. Semantics

3. Pragmatics

4. Semiotics

These are the layers you need to solve.

Saussure already pointed out these issues over a century ago, and Linguists turned ML Researchers like Stuart Russell and Paul Smolensky tried in vain to resolve this.

It basically took 60 years just to crack syntax at scale, and the other layers are still fairly far away.

Furthermore, Syntax is not a solved problem yet in most languages.

Try communicating with GPT-4o in colloquial Bhojpuri, Koshur, or Dogri, let alone much less represented languages and dialects.