Ilya Sutskever

We have our cortex, right?

It has all those brain regions.

And the cortex is uniform, but the brain regions and the neurons in the cortex, they kind of speak to their neighbors mostly.

And that explains why you get brain regions.

Because if you want to do some kind of speech processing, all the neurons that do speech need to talk to each other.

And because neurons can only speak to their nearby neighbors, for the most part, it has to be a region.

All the regions are mostly located in the same place from person to person.

So maybe evolution hard-coded literally a location on the brain.

So it says, oh, like when like, you know, the GPS of the brain, GPS coordinates, such and such, when that fires, that's what you should care about.

Like maybe that's what evolution did because that would be within the toolkit of evolution.

who get half of their brains removed in childhood.

And they still have all their brain regions, but they all somehow move to just one hemisphere, which suggests that the brain regions, the location is not fixed.

And so that theory is not true.

It would have been cool if it was true, but it's not.

And so I think that's a mystery, but it's an interesting mystery.

Like the fact is somehow...

evolution was able to endow us to care about social stuff very, very reliably.

And even people who have like all kinds of strange mental conditions and deficiencies and emotional problems tend to care about this also.

So the way I would describe it as there are some ideas that I think are promising and I want to investigate them and see if they are indeed promising or not.

It's really that simple.