We’ve built language models with hundreds of billions of parameters. They pass tests, write essays, imitate conversation. But here’s the thing:

None of them actually understand what they’re saying.

None of them can ask their own questions, reflect on meaning, or form genuine intention. So I’m asking the question no one wants to

What if we’ve been building AI on the wrong foundation all along?

I think intelligence is about structure.

About how you build understanding. How you connect one concept to another. How you get that “Aha!” moment when something clicks, not just because you’ve seen A show up next to B a lot of times.

These days, AI is great at guessing. But it doesn’t understand. The more data it gets, the more fluent it sounds. But it’s also more obvious: 

none of them can actually think.

And for me, the more I sit with this, the more I keep coming back to the same thought:

Maybe intelligence isn’t built on data. Maybe it’s built on language.

Not language as a tool.

But language as the thing underneath thinking. The core structure that lets us form concepts, link ideas, create abstraction, and imagine what doesn’t yet exist.

I’m not saying I can prove this. I’m not even saying it’s some new revolutionary insight.

But the more I read from Vygotsky, Chomsky, Friston, and others, the more I realize:

A lot of serious minds have pointed in this same direction.

Language shapes thought. It’s not a side effect of intelligence. It might be the roott of it

And honestly, that makes me more confident in my own intuition. Not because I need to be right. But because this line of thinking feels human

This is my research proposal:

https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.12996.54406

i would love to hear any opinion, advice, or even a new kind of perspective.