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Very cool, although I found the link to LLMs toward the end to be a little odd.


Definitely, it’s a “we know the only thing anyone cares about right now is AI, so, look this is kind of like AI, sort of, if you squint”


Haha, luckily not! It's a very speculative link, so we didn't want to talk about "AI" too much in the main post. But we originally got interested in this concept because we are interested in other forms of input to the brain (other than the classic reading, listening, watching, etc). The nose is interesting because it seems to have many independent basis vectors and very sharp discrimination ability, so it might be a sensor into which you can pack many inputs. LLMs are just a proof-by-example that ~1k input dimensions is enough to really encode semantic meaning.


I'd personally be very sceptical that the human brain could derive much meaning from smell beyond "smells bad don't eat" or "reminds me of something", but I guess I would have said the same about creating smells via ultrasound so what do I know.


Do you have a testable hypothesis about this or are you flailing in the dark?



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