Artificial intelligence sheds light on how the brain processes language: Neuroscientists find the internal workings of next-word prediction models resemble those of language-processing centers in the brain

The most recent generation of predictive language models also appears to learn something about the underlying meaning of language. These models can not only predict the word that comes next, but also perform tasks that seem to require some degree of genuine understanding, such as question answering, document summarization, and story completion. Such models were designed to optimize performance for the specific function of predicting text, without attempting to mimic anything about how the human brain performs this task or understands language. But a new study from MIT neuroscientists suggests the underlying function of these models resembles the function of language-processing centers in the human brain. Computer models that perform well on other types of language tasks do not show this similarity to the human brain, offering evidence that the human brain may use next-word prediction to drive language processing.