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...

Then LLMs came along, and ML folks got rather too excited that they contain implicit knowledge (which, of course, is required to deal with ambiguity). Then the new aspiration as "all in one" and "bigger is better", not analyzing what components are needed and how to orchestrate their interplay.

From an engineering (rather than science) point of view, the "end-to-end black box" approach is perhaps misguided, because the result will be a non-transparent system by definition. Individual sub-models should be connected in a way that retains control (e.g. in dialog agents, SRI's Open Agent Architecture was a random example of such "glue" to tie components together, to name but one).

Regarding the science, I do believe language adds to the power of thinking; while (other) animals can of course solve simple problems without language, language permits us to define layers of abstractions (by defining and sharing new concepts) that goes beyond simple, non-linguistic thoughts. Programming languages (created by us humans somewhat in the image of human language) and the language of mathematics are two examples where we push this even further (beyond the definition of new named concepts, to also define new "DSL" syntax) - but all of these could not come into beying without human language: all formal specs and all axioms are ultimately and can only be formulated in human language. So without language, we would likely be stuck at a very simple point of development, individually and collectively.

EDIT: 2 typos fixed

In my personal learning journey I have been exploring the space of intuitive learning which is dominant in physical skills. Singing requires extremely precise control of actions we can't fully articulate or even rationalise. Teaching those skills requires metaphors and visualising and a whole lot of feedback + trial & error.

I believe that this kind of learning is fundamentally non verbal and we can achieve abstraction of these skills without language. Walking is the most universal of these skills and we learn it before we can speak but if you study it (or better try to program a robot to walk with as many degrees of freedom as the human musculoskeletal system) you will discover that almost all of us don't understand what all the things that go into the "simple" task of walking!

My understanding is that people who are gifted at sports or other physical skills like musical instruments have developed the ability to discover and embed these non verbal abstractions quickly. When I practise the piano and am working on something fast, playing semiquavers at anything above 120bpm is not really conscious anymore in the sense of "press this key then that key"

The concept of arpeggio is verbal but the action is non verbal. In human thought where does verbal and non-verbal start and end? Its probably a continuum