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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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avazhi ◴[] No.41892603[source]
It’s impossible to overstate how crude and useless blood flow MRI studies are, at least relative to the hype they receive.

Spoiler alert: brains require a lot of blood, constantly, just to not die. Looking at blood flow on an MRI to determine neural circuitry has to deal with the double whammy of both an extremely crude tool and a correlation/causation fallacy.

This article and the study are arguably useless.

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1. agumonkey ◴[] No.41893622[source]
The connectome and brain mapping efforts might be a better research path for the coming years I guess