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...

A crow has a small brain, but also has very small neurons, so ends up having 1.5B neurons, similar to a dog or some monkeys.

Your responding to a claim that was never made. The claim was don't assume humans are smarter than whales. Nobody said whales are more intelligent than humans. He just said don't assume.

Anyway, this is just like solipsism, you won't find a sincere one outside the asylum. Every Reddit intellectual writing such tired drivel as "who's to say humans are more intelligent than beasts?" deep down knows the score.