The actual paper [1] says that functional MRI (which is measuring which parts of the brain are active by sensing blood flow) indicates that different brain hardware is used for non-language and language functions. This has been suspected for years, but now there's an experimental result.
What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs. It's not clear what that something else is. But, as the paper mentions, the low-end mammals and the corvids lack language but have some substantial problem-solving capability. That's seen down at squirrel and crow size, where the brains are tiny. So if someone figures out to do this, it will probably take less hardware than an LLM.
This is the next big piece we need for AI. No idea how to do this, but it's the right question to work on.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07522-w.epdf?shar...
A crow has a small brain, but also has very small neurons, so ends up having 1.5B neurons, similar to a dog or some monkeys.
The absence of both of these things is an incredible crippler for technological development. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are, you're never going to achieve much technologically without these.
I don't think brain size correlations is as straightforward as 'bigger = better' every time but we simply don't know how intelligent most of these species are. Land and Water are completely different beasts.
Intelligence is the ability to use experience to predict your environment and the outcomes of your own actions. It's a tool for survival.