←back to thread

549 points orcul | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.202s | source
Show context
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...

replies(35): >>41890104 #>>41890470 #>>41891063 #>>41891228 #>>41891262 #>>41891383 #>>41891507 #>>41891639 #>>41891749 #>>41892068 #>>41892137 #>>41892518 #>>41892576 #>>41892603 #>>41892642 #>>41892738 #>>41893400 #>>41893534 #>>41893555 #>>41893732 #>>41893748 #>>41893960 #>>41894031 #>>41894713 #>>41895796 #>>41895908 #>>41896452 #>>41896476 #>>41896479 #>>41896512 #>>41897059 #>>41897270 #>>41897757 #>>41897835 #>>41905326 #
1. westurner ◴[] No.41905326[source]
"Language models can explain neurons in language models" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35877402#35886145 :

> Recent work has revealed that the neural activity patterns correlated with sensation, cognition, and action often are not stable and instead undergo large scale changes over days and weeks—a phenomenon called representational drift.

[...]

So, I'm not sure how conclusive this fmri activation study is either.

Though, is there a proto language that's not even necessary for the given measured aspects of condition?

Which artificial network architecture best approximates which functionally specialized biological neutral networks?

OpenCogPrime:KnowledgeRepresentation > Four Types of Knowledge: https://wiki.opencog.org/w/OpenCogPrime:KnowledgeRepresentat... :

> Sensory, Procedural, Episodic, Declarative

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40105068#40107537 re: cognitive hierarchy and specialization :

> But FWIU none of these models of cognitive hierarchy or instruction are informed by newer developments in topological study of neural connectivity;