Preprint finds LLMs spontaneously develop brain-like modular organization, hinting at a universal principle of intelligence
CatAstro_Piyush · x · 2026-10-30
- Presented in a Caltech guest lecture, the authors' new preprint shows that LLMs spontaneously develop a modular organization resembling the human brain, which separates language, formal reasoning, social reasoning, and physical reasoning into distinct networks.
- Since brains and LLMs are shaped by entirely different optimization processes (biological evolution vs. gradient descent), converging on the same modular design suggests modularity may be a fundamental property of intelligent systems rather than an accident of biology.
- The talk also covered using AI models as model organisms to study cognition; slides and the paper are publicly available.
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