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.

The absence of both of these things is an incredible crippler for technological development. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are, you're never going to achieve much technologically without these.

I don't think brain size correlations is as straightforward as 'bigger = better' every time but we simply don't know how intelligent most of these species are. Land and Water are completely different beasts.

Intelligence is the ability to use experience to predict your environment and the outcomes of your own actions. It's a tool for survival.

However, I do think that a meaningful intelligence comparison between humans and dolphins, etc, would conclude that we are more intelligent, especially based on our reasoning/planning (= multi-step prediction) abilities, which allows us not only to predict our environment but also to modify it to our desires in very complex ways.

I'm not sure how you would make meaningful comparisons here. We can't communicate to them as they communicate and we live in almost completely different environments. Any such comparison would be extremely biased to us.

>which allows us not only to predict our environment but also to modify it to our desires in very complex ways.

We modify our environment mostly through technology. Intelligence is a big part of technology sure but it's not the only part of it and without the other parts (hands with opposable thumbs, fire etc), technology as we know it wouldn't exist and our ability to modify the environment would seem crippled to any outside observer regardless of how intelligent we may be.

It's not enough to think that the earth revolves around the sun, we need to build the telescopes (with hands and materials melted down and forged with fire) to confirm it.

It's not enough to dream and devise of flight, we need the fire to create the materials that we dug with our hands and the hands to build them.

It's not enough to think that Oral communication is insufficient for transmitting information through generations. What else will you do without opposable thumbs or an equivalent ?

Fire is so important for so many reasons but one of the biggest is that it was an easy source of large amounts of energy that allowed us to bootstrap technology. Where's that easy source of energy underwater ?

Without all the other aspects necessary for technology, we are relegated to hunter/gatherer levels of influencing the environment at best. Even then, we still crafted tools that creatures without opposable thumbs would never be able to craft.