An interesting piece on how human brains have actually shrunk over time. Researchers present two hypotheses: first, as societies grew complex and people started living in groups, they relied on collective intelligence — the idea that a group of people are smarter than the smartest person in the group. Second, the brain circuitry evolved to be more optimized in a smaller package.

Perhaps this is where we continue to focus next with foundation models. First, with collective models that perform well together like the “mixture of experts” technique. And next, via quantization and pruning methods to optimize model size. Nature got there first.