Can artificial intelligence help us understand how the brain works?

Back at first of the twenty first century, after I studied for MBA at NYU Stern, one class I took was called Data Mining, which introduced many algorithms to “mine” the information, intending to robotically find the meaning of the information for forecasts and decision making. The neural network was one in every of them, but it surely was removed from the highest selections since it was slow, required quite a lot of data to coach, and, hence, had minimal use cases. Twenty years later, neural network algorithms have thrived because the cornerstones of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) as a consequence of the tremendous computational power that removed the elemental obstacle and, in turn, led to the invention of more advanced algorithms and models.

With the fast advances in artificial neural networks and deep learning, AI has surpassed humans in certain areas. Many intriguing questions have arisen, resembling how similar AI and the human brain are, what the longer term objective of AI is, and to what degree AI can replace human intelligence. In this text, I’ll start with the neural mechanisms of biological learning and the way they’ve inspired AI. A greater understanding of the history will help us grasp the elemental difference between artificial neural networks and other machine learning models (e.g., support vector machines, decision trees, random forests). It was the training features inspired by the brain that led to the recent breakthroughs of artificial neural networks, including convolution neural networks (CNN) for image recognition and huge language models (LLM) for generative AI. I’ll then discuss the differences between human intelligence and AI and our perspective on the longer term direction of AI. What we expect to see next is that AI will proceed to learn from discoveries within the brain, and, equally vital, AI can even help us higher understand how the brain works. The continual exchange of ideas will propel each neuroscience and AI to advance at a healthy, faster pace.

Learning is a vital feature of animal and human brains. When a baby is born, she has to learn almost all the pieces from scratch, including recognizing faces, speaking, and walking, followed by a few years of college education and training. How does learning occur within the brain?