Unifying the structures of language in a neural population code

Large language models (LLMs) have mastered human language in ways that no previous computational system has. While rule-based, symbolic systems sufficed for constrained, well-defined problems, they were not able to accommodate the context-sensitive expressivity of natural language. LLMs instead use statistical learning to encode the diversity of linguistic structures into a unified high-dimensional embedding space. Strikingly, this context-driven, distributed representation closely parallels neural population codes, suggesting that the human language system may have converged on a similar computational strategy. Drawing on a growing body of work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive neuroscience, we show that LLMs can serve as cognitively plausible models of the neural computations supporting language in the human brain. We conclude that explaining how language can emerge from neural population codes, in both biological and artificial systems, will not be achieved through the incremental refinement of algebraic-symbolic theories but will demand new theoretical paradigms.