Like a human brain, artificial neural networks take some kind of input (words, say) and produce outputs (other words). For the human brain, what happens in the middle is something of a black box, but we know that words we hear are translated into neural activity that represents meaning, then decoded into other words. Mr. Morgan says artificial neural networks do something similar, only using numbers.
“There’s good, and growing, evidence that L.L.M.s encode syntax and words in a similar way as the brain,” Mr. Morgan said.
But unlike with a brain, you can directly examine these encoding processes in a large language model just by looking at the code. So the A.I. can act as a pseudo brain to test hypotheses about language that are hard to test in real brains.
“In my work, I figure that if I find that the middle layers of a computer model are sensitive to a particular property that I’m interested in in the brain, it’s a decent indication that the brain might care about that,” he said.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/08/11/upshot/ai-jobs.html
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