[rodoxcasta]

They record the brain language processing via fMRI and the activations of some AI models during language tasks, then create a linear map between them. Then they use that map to try to predict how the brain will process a language task using the AI model activations for the same sentence. This holds true for different imaging techniques and different language tasks.

Transformers perform qualitatively better than other architectures, and GPT2 (the most advanced public model at the time) shows near 100% accuracy. The best correlate of performance in the experiment is the next-word prediction accuracy of the model. Other AI performance metrics don't appear significant.

The conclusion is that this is strong evidence that the brain processes language using the same predictive algorithm as transformers. And GPT2 may have an architecture very similar to the language processing areas of the brain.