Artificial brains are helping scientists study the real thing

Artificial brains are helping scientists study the real thing
Programmers are now telling neuroscientists useful things about biological brains. (Image: Getty)
The Economist
The striking progress in artificial intelligence over the past decade is mostly down to advances in machine learning, where computers teach themselves complicated tasks by crunching large quantities of data, rather than having to be programmed directly by humans. This approach has driven rapid progress in computer vision, language translation and, most recently, the human-like conversational skills of chatbots such as GPT-4.The learning is done by software models called “artificial neural networks” (ANNS). The standard descript...

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AFP 19 Nov 2025