[ewheeler]

While there are some similarities, yes, our brains definitely don't have anything akin to backpropagation, which is the critical mechanism for how current AI models learn.

Hinton has some research on a forward-forward learning paradigm [1], which might be closer to how our brains learn (but the artificial implementations are not great yet). He also posits that maybe the purpose of humans' dreams are generating negative data for such a contrastive forward-forward learning mechanism.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.13345