One thing that lifted my spirits in 2025 was reading Max Bennett’s A Brief History of Intelligence.
Bennett is an ad-tech guy who got into artificial intelligence. Not in the sense that he played around with ChatGPT and then started posting on LinkedIn about paradigm shifts or whatever. But in the sense that he founded AI companies, registered patents and published peer-reviewed papers on evolutionary neuroscience.
His book charts the evolution of the brain, from the first nematodes all the way to Homo sapiens, and along the way, compares it with AI. It’s all interesting stuff, but the bit that really left an impression on me concerned the neocortex.
Neocortices started popping up in mammals around 200 million years ago, and they comprise 70% of the volume of modern human brains. What makes the neocortex special is that it lets us build a model of the world inside our heads, and then imagine reality as it isn’t. Without the neocortex we couldn’t make plans, explore counterfactuals or even act with intent (ie, do something with the aim of achieving a specific outcome).
The AI models that have sent our industry into a tizzy generally don’t work like this. Instead, they rely on something called model-free reinforcement learning, which can only figure things out through trial and error. And this cheered me up no end because it means that, even though today’s systems can surpass humans at specific tasks, until they possess a model of the world they’re unlikely to achieve anything resembling general human intelligence.
And that’s not likely to happen anytime soon because, as it turns out, it’s incredibly difficult to imbue a machine with such a model. Building a representation of the entire world is a gargantuan task by itself, and that’s before you get to the problem of how a machine chooses what to simulate.
We may one day learn how to create machines with world models* — or find a workaround to replace them — but until we do, humans have the upper hand over AI in our ability to imagine and innovate.
That’s why MediaCat is all-in on human creativity because people doing smart things with media (and sometimes with AI) to help brands grow will continue to be what drives this industry forward for a good while yet.
And on that note, I hope you enjoy our first MediaCat annual, which you can download for free here. We’ve tried our best to fill it with sharp insights and viewpoints, inspirational case studies and rigorous research — telling you how it is, so you can imagine how it isn’t.
* Bennett does say in his book, which was published in 2023, that artificial general intelligence looks likely at some point.
Main image by Shawn Day on Unsplash
