Author: John Ball

  • | |

    Knowledge versus Language

    The biggest limitation of today’s Large Language models (LLMs)—or just ChatGPT for many people who aren’t in the AI space—is the tight coupling between the language, knowledge and context. I call today’s kind of statistical approximation ‘lossy’ because its representation cannot be converted back to the original meaning at all times. Now I’m biased because I have solved how brains work sufficiently to vastly improve AI with an implementation that will revolutionize how our devices work. With sufficient funding we can demonstrate our differences while progressing a valuable roadmap for society. I laid this out in my book ‘How to Solve AI with Our Brain’ including my 5 year vision and how this will be achieved, in Chapters 18-20. The final frontier in science: how…

  • | |

    Understanding isn’t just memorization

    We learn all the time, continuously, regardless of our age. We never stop, but would it surprise you that many scientists propose the model where we stop learning while we are young? That is false, although more research would help prove the point. We just need some people to use experimental science!   Inside view of the ground floor of a Starbucks in Tokyo – wow! The perfect venue to learn more about language and our ability to understand — with coffee!   OK, how can I claim that learning doesn’t stop while we are young? Why so confident? Do you know the (made up) word Preada? It’s a brand that sells glasses, like Prada. Preada puts additional effort (E) into the designs of Prada,…

  • | |

    New language model for human conversation!

    The breathtaking view from Kobe University looking over Osaka Bay – home to the RRG 2025 bi-annual conference. Linguistic Conference: RRG 2025 The linguistic conference in Kobe, Japan, has just wrapped up. Expert linguists from around the world gave English presentations of progress over 2 days in a variety of languages including: Japanese, Taiwanese, Cantonese, Breton, Vietnamese, German, Mandarin, Mexican languages, Taiwan Sign language, and a range of African languages. They all use RRG as the model of communications. Primary developer, Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., has continued work on and growing the global community since the early 1980s. What makes Van Valin’s contributions so significant in the 20th and 21st century is its adoption of a model in which the words in a language…

  • | |

    Magic from the Speech Genie

    Learning a new language as an adult is difficult, requiring years of work to progress. Or does it? Today’s discussion is with Chris Lonsdale, the creator of Kungfu English, a system designed to mimic his success in learning Mandarin and Cantonese as a 20-year-old. Subscribe now Chris is a language educator and psycho-linguist whose system has been teaching Mandarin Chinese speakers how to speak English since the early 2000s. I have started working with him to integrate my brain-based AI solution with a more general version of his language learning application — the result? Introducing Speech Genie! The first available languages will be English and Mandarin. The magic of the Genie is in using your brain’s capabilities to learn language in a way that mimics…

  • | |

    What’s missing from AI – Part 1

    A brain in hand, a robot here ponders the use of ‘contextual meaning’ to help it emulate humans. But how do we store meaning? Photo by julien Tromeur on Unsplash Background In the 1930s, the American focus on behaviourism turned the linguistics world from the science of signs (semiotics) to one aligned with one of the great scientists in history, Pāṇini, who lived perhaps as far back as the 7th century BC. The use of Pāṇini’s linguistic model by Leonard Bloomfield led to linguistics excluding meaning, such as in the influential Chomsky monograph, Syntactic Structures, published in 1957. My proposed move back to semiotics is a side effect of the highly influential work of Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., whose development of Role and Reference…

  • |

    Patom Theory Understands the Meaning Behind Language

    For most of my life, I have pondered a question that sits at the very center of howour brain works: how do we understand language?The question isn’t how we repeat language, nor how we recognize its surfacepatterns, but how we understand its meaning in context. If you ask ten expertsabout this subject, called Natural Language Understanding or NLU, you will getten different definitions because there are many theories available in academia!These tend to have origins in the 1950s or before and can be seen as validcompetitors in the absence of working solutions.But to most people, understanding is simple. It is the moment when wordsconnect to meaning. You do not ‘predict’ meaning (a popular paradigm in today’smachine learning community): you experience it. To many of us,…

  • Your Struggles Aren’t Your Fault – Rebooting the Brain’s Natural Language System

    For more than forty years I have asked myself a simple question: why do some people learn languages quickly and naturally, while others struggle despite years of study? This question has shaped almost every major decision of my life. It guided my studies in psychology and linguistics. It took me across Asia, where I witnessed firsthand how different cultures approached learning. It led me to develop Kungfu English, the first large-scale brain-based language learning system. And ultimately, it has guided the creation of Speech Genie, a new kind of learning experience powered by cognitive artificial intelligence. I have always believed that language is not something you learn; it is something you acquire. Every human brain is built for language. No one struggles to learn their…