[teleforce]

>There's a whole giant gap between grid cells and intelligence.

Please check this recent article on the state machine in the hippocampus based on learning [1]. The findings support the long-standing proposal that sparse orthogonal representations are a powerful mechanism for memory and intelligence.

[1] Learning produces an orthogonalized state machine in the hippocampus:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08548-w

[Marshferm]

Of course, but the mechanisms “remain obscure”. The entorhinal cortex is but a facet of this puzzle and placement vs head direction etc must be understood beyond mere prediction. There are too many essential parts that are not understood particularly senses and emotion which play the tinkering precursors to evolutionary function that are excluded now as well as the likelyhood that prediction error and prediction are but mistaken precursor computational bottlenecks to unpredictability. Pushing AI into the 4% of a process materially identified as entorhinal is way premature.

This approach simply follows suit with the blundering reverse engineering of the brain in cog sci where material properties are seen in isolation and processes are deduced piecemeal. The brain can only be understood as a whole first. See rhythms of the brain or unlocking the brain.

There’s a terrifying lack of curiosity in the paper you posted, a kind of smug synthetic rush to import code into a part of the brain that’s a directory among directories that has redundancies as a warning: we get along without this.

Your and their view (OSM) is too narrow. eg categorization is baked into the whole brain. How? This is one of 1000s of processes that generalize materially across the entire brain. Isolating "learning" to the allocortex is incredibly misleading.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)...