[mlyle]

The whole idea that memory is stored in a distributed, lossy, and redundant fashion is hardly a new one; I read about the concept of Sparse Distributed Memory in Science News as a youngster more than 3 decades ago, and it in turn was informed by earlier ideas of sparse and spatial-coded memory (e.g. holographic metaphors of recollection).

LLMs provide evidence that you can build systems with these exact properties; no individual perceptron stores a concept, and the encoding is extremely sparse and redundant.

Of course, LLMs don't demonstrate conclusively that the brain works this way, but given that this form of information storage and retrieval works across a real analogous system refutes those that said this would be impossible for the brain to do.