The "uniform nature of the cortex" implies far too much. We know that dramatically different processes happen in different parts of the brain. That needs to be explained and it's where all the interesting questions are. You might as well say every part of the body is made of cells so they all work the same. That might be true at some level of abstraction but it's completely useless.
> No we don't, because we still don't know how human language works.
We do know some ways they don't work: namely neural nets because it can be shown that neural nets can learn languages that human cannot.
> People are still debating Chompsky innate-ism. Again, LLM processing of language offers interesting clues - not just embeddings, but also the fact that language can be learnt with a very simple architecture (transformer) with zero support for "universal grammar" or any such priors.
This tells you nothing about the language faculty just as building a neural net to predict the weather tells you nothing about how the weather operates.
> You seem to be missing the spirit of this whole conversation and the original linked article - it's not about claiming/hypothesizing that the brain works the same as any and all ANN architectures or principles, but rather that one can draw inspiration from ANNs to develop theories and intuitions (which still need to be tested) for how the brain may be working.
People have been making claims that connectionist models will lead to some insight for decades and there isn't much to show for it. No one cares where someone derives their inspiration for their hypotheses, come back when you have some result to show.
Different areas of the cortex are far less specialized than you seem to think. We process language via vision (sign language) just as readily as via hearing. We process vision just as readily via touch (experimental transducer array) as via sight.
> No one cares where someone derives their inspiration
Well, some of us do.
This is just false, you don't know what you are talking about. It's been known for some time that sign language is processed in the same parts of the brain as spoken language.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbm.25254
Why are you so angry?
I'm telling you you are wrong and don't know anything.
You don't even understand the link you posted which says the exact opposite of what you are claiming: That sign language uses Broca's area (the part of the brain believed to be connected to language) just as spoken and written language do.
Calm down.
> we specifically know that LLMs don't work the way the human language faculty do
No we don't, because we still don't know how human language works. People are still debating Chompsky innate-ism. Again, LLM processing of language offers interesting clues - not just embeddings, but also the fact that language can be learnt with a very simple architecture (transformer) with zero support for "universal grammar" or any such priors.
You seem to be missing the spirit of this whole conversation and the original linked article - it's not about claiming/hypothesizing that the brain works the same as any and all ANN architectures or principles, but rather that one can draw inspiration from ANNs to develop theories and intuitions (which still need to be tested) for how the brain may be working.