They’re both neural networks, but the architectures built using those neural connections, and the way they are trained and operate are completely different. There are many different artificial neural network architectures. They’re not all LLMs.
AlphaZero isn’t a LLM. There are Feed Forward networks, recurrent networks, convolutional networks, transformer networks, generative adversarial networks.
Brains have many different regions each with different architectures. None of them work like LLMs. Not even our language centres are structured or trained anything like LLMs.
I'd argue that regardless of the architecture, the more sophisticated brain is still a (massive) language model. If you really think about it, language is the construct that allows brains to go beyond raw instinct and actually create concepts that're useful for "intelligently" planning for the future. The real difference is that brains are trained with raw sensory data (nerve impulses) while today's LLMs are trained with human-generated data (text, images, etc).
It's not at all a language model in the way that LLMs are. At this point we might as well just say that both process information, that's about the level of similarity they have except for the implementation detail of neurons.
Language came after conceptual modeling of the world around us. We're surrounded by social species with theory of mind and even the ability to recognise themselves and communicate with each other, but none of them have language. Even the communications faculties they have operate in completely different parts of their brains than ours with completely different structure. Actually we still have those parts of the brain too.
Conceptual representation and modeling came first, then language came along to communicate those concepts. LLMs are the other way around, linguistic tokens come first and they just stream out more of them.
This is why Noam Chomsky was adamant that what LLMs are actually doing in terms of architecture and function has nothing to do with language. At first I thought he must be wrong, he mustn't know how these things work, but the more I dug into it the more I realised he was right. He did know, and he was analysing this as a linguist with a deep understanding of the cognitive processes of language.
To say that brains are language models you have to ditch completely what the term language model actually means in AI research.
>AlphaZero isn’t a LLM. There are Feed Forward networks, recurrent networks, convolutional networks, transformer networks, generative adversarial networks.
That's irrelevant though, since all the above are still prediction machines based on weights.
If you're ok with the brain being that, then you just changed the architecture (from LLM-like), not the concept.
That's a different statement, yes brains and LLMs are both neural networks.
An LLM is a specific neural architectural structure and training process. Brains are also neural networks, but they are otherwise nothing at all like LLMs and don't function the ways LLMs do architecturally other than being neural networks.
Plus, brain structure and physiology changes thoughout the interweaved processes of learning, aging, acting, emoting, recalling, what have you. It's not an "architecture" that we can technologically recreate, as so much of it emerges from a vastly higher level of complexity and dynamism.